1 . When consuming information, we try to acquire more signals and less noise. We feel like the more information we consume the more signals we receive. While this is probably true on an absolute basis, Nassim Taleb argues in the book Antifragile that it is not true on a relative basis. As you consume more data and the ratio (比率) of noise to signals increases, you know less about what’s going on and you are likely to cause more unintentional trouble.
The supply of information to which we are exposed under modernity is transforming humans from a calm person to a neurotic (神经质的) one. For the purpose of our discussion, the first person only reacts to real information, and the second largely to noise. The difference between the two will show us the difference between noise and signals. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signals are what you need to heed.
In science, noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to. You can use and take advantage of noise and randomness, but noise and randomness can also use and take advantage of you, particularly with the data you get on the Internet or through other media. The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are likely to get, and the higher the noise-to-signal ratio is.
Say you look at information on a yearly basis—the changes you see will all be large ones. The ratio of signals to noise is about one to one—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, and the other half come from randomness. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise and 5 percent signals, and the changes you see daily will certainly be small.
1. What opinion does Nassim Taleb probably hold?| A．It’s hard to know the real truth. | B．The noise-to-signal ratio is changing. |
| C．The information explosion can be harmful. | D．More information brings more signals. |
| A．Notice. | B．Analyse. | C．Solve. | D．Describe. |
| A．Causes and harms of more noise. | B．The meaning and impact of noise. |
| C．The relationship between noise and signals. | D．Advantages and disadvantages of noise. |
| A．Check it frequently. | B．Make use of online data. |
| C．Look at key changes. | D．Focus on all changes in it. |
2 . Nearly one-third of American adolescents and adults are affected by anxiety, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In fact, over the last decade, anxiety has surpassed depression as the most common reason college students seek counseling (咨询) services, the New York Times reported. Sixty-two percent of undergraduates in survey reported “unbearable anxiety,” a significant increase from 50 percent in 2011.
Anxiety, along with depression, cuts across all demographics (人口统计数据), including both privileged and disadvantaged teenagers. But privileged teens are among the most emotionally upset youth in America, Arizona State University psychology professor Suniya Luthar told the New York Times.
“These kids are incredibly anxious and perfectionistic,” Suniya Luthar said, “there’s always one more activity, one more A. P. class, one more thing to do in order to get into a top college. Kids have a sense that they’re not measuring up. The pressure is never-ending and getting worse.” But helicopter parents aren’t always to blame. Many students internalize the anxiety and put the pressure on themselves, Madeline Levine, co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit aimed at improving student well-being, told the Times.
Another expert, psychiatrist Stephanie Eken, said despite the cultural differences, there’s a lot of overlap among teens regarding what makes them anxious. Eken mentions factors range from school, family conflicts, what food to eat, diseases, how they’re perceived by friends and notably in the last few years, Eken told the Times, to a rising fear about terrorism. “They wonder about whether it’s safe to go to a movie theater,” she said.
A lack of close, meaningful relationships is also a major factor. Experts have long said mental and physical changes associated with puberty (青春期) may leave teens at higher risk for anxiety. And social media doesn’t help, Eken said, adding that teens are always comparing themselves with their friends, which leaves them miserable.
When Times reporter Benoit Denizet-Lewis visited Mountain Valley, a nonprofit that offers teens need-based assistance for $910 a day, a college student at the facility said, “I don’t think we realize how much it’s affecting our moods and personalities. Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t live without but that’s making us crazy.”
1. What is the first paragraph mainly about?| A．A big rise in anxiety among teens. |
| B．A report on mental health of adolescents. |
| C．Common mental health disorders in adults. |
| D．The reason for adults seeking counseling services. |
| A．Their parents pressure them too much. |
| B．They are less anxious than disadvantaged teenagers. |
| C．Their pressure often comes from themselves, not from others. |
| D．They suffer extreme anxiety under pressure of perfection. |
| A．To give general causes of stress and anxiety. |
| B．To show typical examples of cultural differences. |
| C．To illustrate the importance of close relationships. |
| D．To state the impact of everyday things on mental health. |
| A．Is anxiety increasing in the United States? |
| B．Why are more US teens suffering from anxiety? |
| C．How is social media affecting teens with anxiety? |
| D．How do we help teenagers deal with mental illness? |
3 . We live in the age of the short attention span. And yet: Finding a recipe in a post requires first scrolling past a “novel” detailing the chef’s personal experience with the dish. Even platforms once known for short-form media are stretching the limits: YouTube videos once were within 10 minutes; now they can and do reach 12 hours. Even TikTok is going long, reportedly testing a new limit of up to 15 minutes for some creators.
Surely some of this is born of genuine audience interest. Length, after all, is sometimes associated with quality. Sometimes, storytelling deserves a surprising length. Other times, it does not. Online media are frequently lengthened not because the subject demands it but because creators are attempting to game algorithms (算法) to make more money. Algorithms, on the most basic level, are supposed to recommend whatever else people post online. Yet in the process, they end up encouraging people to generate a lot of junk.
Some of these apps seem to realize what they’ve done. TikTok and YouTube give users the ability to speed things up. But the solution only underscores the problem. Because it gives rise to all those ads that run before videos or between paragraphs. Any extra real estate for these ads, be it space on a page or time on a podcast, is a chance for platforms to make more money.
Some algorithms may in fact prioritize length as an indicator of quality. But it’s hard to say for sure, because tech companies tend not to give many details about their inner workings. In some ways, whether an algorithm prefers longer videos matters less than whether creators think an algorithm does. If people start believing that longer videos do “better”, they’ll make more of them.
People are afraid that generative AI will pollute the Internet. But social-media and search algorithms have been doing that for years. It’s even cheaper and easier for generative AI to produce long content. All of this is just a taste of what’s to come.
1. How does the author introduce the topic?| A．By telling stories. | B．By referring to studies. |
| C．By giving examples. | D．By offering personal experience. |
| A．To enhance their storytelling abilities. | B．To take advantage of algorithms for profit. |
| C．To gather data concerning popular subjects. | D．To provide the audience with interesting ideas. |
| A．Highlights. | B．Upgrades. | C．Overlooks. | D．Forecasts. |
| A．Algorithms are sure to pick out longer videos. |
| B．The development of AI will facilitate longer content. |
| C．The best content is lengthened by video producers. |
| D．Search algorithms are easily polluted and destroyed. |
4 . Why do farmers grow crops outside in fields when we can arrange them vertically (垂直地)? The idea of vertical farming was first proposed in 1999. It was seen as a way to save space, reduce air miles and transform old and abandoned buildings, like warehouses. In 2021, Fortune Business Insights valued the global vertical farming market at 3.47 billion dollars. Now, however, this industry is under threat, partly due to rising energy costs.
According to the magazine Science Focus, vertical farming gives ten times the yield (产量) of conventional outdoor farming. However, in order for crops to grow using this method, plants are placed in a controlled environment, grown not under the Sun, but under LED lights and watered with recycled water pumped on a closed-loop system (闭环系统).
Unfortunately, energy prices have risen across the globe. Therefore, this reliance on electricity has meant the last few years have not been easy for the industry. Cindy van Rijswick, from the Dutch research firm RaboResearch, has estimated that operational costs for a vertical farm are around 15% higher now compared to 18 months ago. Infarm, Europe’s largest vertical farming company, made around500 employees redundant (被裁员的) in November 2022 because they needed to downsize. They blamed higher operating costs due to energy increases as one reason for the layoffs.
Another issue related to the cost-of -living crisis and affecting vertical farming is the type of produce grown. This includes herbs such as basil, as well as salad leaves and leafy greens. Compared to traditionally farmed plants, like onions and carrots, these products tend to be more expensive, which could lead to reduced demand as consumers become more cautious about their spending.
So, it seems that a future with food grown under LED lights is looking less and less bright.
1. What is the feature of vertical farming?| A．Saving urban land and achieving zero emissions. |
| B．Demanding highly technical and complex control. |
| C．High energy consumption and low output value. |
| D．Making full use of sunlight and water resources. |
| A．By making assumptions. |
| B．By criticizing a typical behaviour. |
| C．By listing specific data and facts. |
| D．By referring to a social phenomenon. |
| A．Vertical farming avoids climate and disaster impacts. |
| B．Vertical farming costs jumped due to higher energy prices. |
| C．Vertical farming grows high-value, cost-effective produce. |
| D．High yield protects vertical farming from market competition. |
| A．Is This the End of Vertical Farming? | B．Is Vertical Farming Highly Efficient? |
| C．Challenges Industrial Agriculture Faces | D．New Trends in Vertical Agriculture |
5 . Hawaii lawmakers are considering legislation (立法) that would require visitors to pay for a year-long license or pass to visit state parks. Josh Green is the state’s governor. He said, “We get between 9 and 10 million visitors a year, but we only have 1.4 million people living here.” He added, “Those 10 million travellers should be helping us sustain our environment.” Lawmakers still debating how much they would charge.
The governor campaigned in 2022 on the idea of having all tourists pay a $50 fee to enter the state. Legislators think this would violate US constitutional protections for free travel. They instead think visitors should pay to enter parks and trails. Either policy would be a first of its kind for any US state. Hawaii’s leaders are following the example of other popular tourist areas with similar fees or taxes. They include Venice, Italy, and Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.
Hawaii State Representative Sean Quinlan is the leader of the House Tourism Committee. He said changes in the activities of travellers are part of Hawaii’s push. He said golf rounds per visitor per day have dropped 30 percent over the past 10 years while hiking has increased50 percent. People are also seeking out isolated places they have seen on social media. The state does not have the money to oversee and protect all these places, he said.
Most state parks and trails are currently free. Some of the most popular ones already charge, like Diamond Head State Monument. That trail leads hikers from the floor of a 300,000-year-old volcano up to the top. It gets 1 million visitors each year and costs $5for each traveller.
A bill currently before the legislature would require visitors over the age of 15to buy a yearly pass to visit forests, parks, trails or “other natural area on state land”. People who live in Hawaii would not need to pay.
1. What does the underlined word “violate” mean in Paragraph 2?| A．Break. | B．Establish. | C．Uphold. | D．Perfect. |
| A．The decreasing number of tourists to Hawaii. |
| B．Advantages of Hawaii’s tourism resources. |
| C．The increasing financial burden of Hawaii. |
| D．One reason for wanting to charge tourists. |
| A．None of the attractions in Hawaii charge fees currently. |
| B．The goal to charge fees is to limit the number of tourists. |
| C．Lawmakers are arguing about whether charging fees is legal. |
| D．Charging fees is beneficial for Hawaii’s natural environment. |
| A．A news report. | B．A travel guide. |
| C．A law textbook. | D．A promotional brochure. |
6 . Women interpret emojis differently to men, research suggests. Scientists say this is because these small digital pictographs can be ambiguous and be perceived differently by different people. The researchers surveyed 523 adults (49% men and 51% women) to review 24 different emojis. Each emoji — taken from Apple, Windows and WeChat platforms — represented one of the six emotional states labelled by the team: happy, disgusted, fearful, sad, surprised, and angry.
They found women were able to more accurately interpret happy, fearful, sad and angry emoji labels compared to men. No gender differences were observed for surprised or disgusted emoji, the team said. Dr. Ruth Filik, associate professor in the School of Psychology at The University of Nottingham, said: “What I found most interesting and surprising is that there are so many individual differences in how people interpret these emojis.”
“It is important to note that the results reflect how often participants labelled the emoji in the same way as the researchers. So, we should think of the results in terms of there being differences across people in how they interpret emojis, rather than some people being better at it than others. We should keep these differences in mind when using emojis in our messages.”
The researchers said that stylised images of faces expressing different emotions can add both nuance as well as potential ambiguity to messages sent via texts, emails or even social media. To understand more about how emojis are interpreted, the team recruited 270 people from the UK and 253 from China, who were aged between 18 to 84 years old.
Each emoji was assigned an emotion label by the researchers, which they say may not correspond exactly with the emoji as used in real life. In addition to gender, the team also found age to play a role in how emoji are interpreted, with younger adults faring better than the older ones in matching the emoji with their assigned labels. The researchers say ambiguity of emojis is worth further research, “especially when communicating across gender, age, or cultures”.
1. Why are emojis interpreted differently according to paragraph 1?| A．Emojis are taken from different platforms. |
| B．People’s perception on emojis may vary differently. |
| C．Varied emotional states are labelled to an emoji by itself. |
| D．The number of women involved in the study is more than that of men. |
| A．Women are better at interpreting emojis than men. |
| B．The meaning of the emojis should be defined by researchers. |
| C．We should pay attention to individual differences in interpretation when using emojis. |
| D．Those interpreted the emojis in the same way as the researchers have done correctly. |
| A．Difference. | B．Similarity. | C．Familiarity. | D．Details. |
| A．To introduce an interesting phenomenon of online chatting. |
| B．To show that different emojis have different meanings. |
| C．To prove that ambiguity of emojis is determined by one’s gender, age and culture. |
| D．To remind people to pay special attention to the ambiguity of emojis. |
7 . Artificial intelligence (Al) has the potential to develop more efficient methods of farming in order to fight global warming.
Global warming threatens every aspect of our everyday lives, including crop production. It will reduce the soil moisture (水分) in areas close to the equator according to a study. We are already seeing the negative impact of these changed growing conditions on our crop production. Climate change harms poorer countries that do not have the money to import food. The result is growing food insecurity. However, agriculture is not just affected by global warming — agriculture is part of a vicious (恶性的) cycle in which farming leads to global warming, which in turn destroys agricultural production. The process of clearing land for agriculture results in widespread deforestation (毁林) and contributes to 40 percent of global methane production. Therefore, to deal with climate change, it is necessary to ensure reforestation — but how? What is the path to efficient, environmentally-conscious farming?
This is where AI enters the scene. Farmers use AI for methods such as precision agriculture; they can monitor crop moisture, soil composition, and temperature in growing areas, enabling farmers to increase production by learning how to take care of their crops and determine the ideal amount of water to use. Furthermore, this technology may help reduce deforestation by allowing humans to grow food in urban areas. It could be especially beneficial for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, where much of the population lives in cities.
However, AI is far from a silver bullet — it could actually contribute to global warming as well. Due to the large amount of data that AI needs to process, training a single AI releases five times the emissions that an average car would give off during its lifetime. Further, securing access to AI on a global scale may pose some challenges. Countries will need experts in the field who can successfully use the technology and Internet connection, neither of which are always readily available. Therefore, there is still a long way for developing countries to take advantage of the benefits of AI.
Given these concerns, global leaders must consider the potential costs, and the environmental consequences of data processing before developing AI for use in agriculture.
1. What can we learn about today’s agriculture from paragraph 2?| A．It is the main challenge of reforestation. |
| B．Poorer countries rely on it more than before. |
| C．It is still dependent on deforestation for more land. |
| D．It is both a victim and a cause of global warming. |
| A．Building farming communities in cities. |
| B．Abandoning traditional farming methods. |
| C．Making the most of agricultural resources. |
| D．Balancing farming with farmers’ everyday lives. |
| A．There are technical barriers in developing countries. |
| B．The relevant technology is still under development. |
| C．The process of developing Al is difficult. |
| D．There is no one-size-fits-all AI technology. |
| A．The benefits of agricultural AI |
| B．The future of farming: AI and agriculture |
| C．A block to environmentally-conscious agriculture |
| D．Global warming and agriculture: a vicious cycle |
8 . When we hold our breath and go underwater, we’ll soon be unable to stand it.
Sama-Bajau is a collective term (集合术语) that refers to several closely related native peoples. The Bajau live on long houseboats or small wooden houses that are built on the sea, close to the shore in Southeast Asia.
As they make their living primarily from fishing, they have become expert free divers (自由潜水者). Bajau divers have the longest daily diving time without breathing among allhumans.
It appears that centuries of free diving have scientifically distinguished the Sama-Bajau. According to research, the Bajau’s spleens (脾脏) are much larger than the average people’s on land.
| A．Larger spleens can have some weaknesses. |
| B．Therefore, many older divers are hard of hearing. |
| C．The difference makes the Bajau quite able to dive underwater. |
| D．They only go ashore to trade or seek shelter during sea storms. |
| E．Bajau children master swimming and diving skills at an early age. |
| F．The existence of this special group of people is threatened nowadays. |
| G．With free diving training, we can increase the time underwater by a few minutes. |
9 . As people are becoming more socially conscious about where their food comes from and how it impacts the planet, they are choosing animal-free plant-based options. Cow-free meat has been around for quite some time and the popularity of the cultivated (培育的) meat from Aleph Farms and others are soaring. While there are a large number of plant-based milk substitutes (替代品), none of them have the same taste of cow’s milk. Now, an Israeli food-tech startup Remilk created real dairy products without harming a single cow or the planet.
The company stresses that their product Remilk is not a milk substitute but rather is the real deal. And the end product is very healthy. The company also says that the lab-produced milk tastes identical to the real thing and they hope to eventually replace cows by creating every dairy product sold. They expect to roll out plant-based cheese and yogurt in addition to milk. “Remil k was founded with the mission to stop using animals to produce our food because, as dairy lovers, we realize that giving up on milk is not an option,” said Aviv Wolff, CEO of Remilk. “But today’s milk comes with an unreasonable price tag. The dairy industry is destructive to our planet, our health, and our animals, and is simply not sustainable anymore.”
The environmental price tag of dairy farming is way too high. According to the World Wildlife Fund, dairy cows add a huge amount of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and contribute to global warming and climate change as well as foul the air around them. Dairy operations consume large amounts of water and run-off of manure (粪肥) and fertilizers from these farms get into local waterways. The production of Remilk uses only 5percent of the resources and produces only 1 percent of the waste of producing cow’s milk according to the company. And they accomplish this by being 100 percent cruelty-free unlike dairy farms.
1. What does the underlined word soaring in Para. 1 mean?| A．Recovering. | B．Disappearing. | C．Declining. | D．Increasing. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Opposed. | D．Unconcerned. |
| A．By giving a definition. | B．By presenting the process. |
| C．By making comparison. | D．By giving examples. |
| A．Healthier Milk, Rising Popularity | B．Saving Endangered Animals |
| C．Fresher Milk, Better Taste | D．Making Milk Without Cows |
10 . Have you ever taken a personality test and found the results to be scarily accurate, checked your horoscope (星象学) and had everything come true or taken an online quiz that told you precisely what your favorite Disney princess means about you? Well, we certainly have done so too many times.
We discovered that we’ve all been falling victim to the Barnum effect.
The key to success of astrology and personality test keep the statements as vague as possible, with a mix of mostly positive and some negative content.
| A．Indeed, Barnum proved to be right. |
| B．You believe in such mysterious tests firmly. |
| C．Not every statement are worth considering. |
| D．So, keep in mind that we are not immune to the Barnum effect. |
| E．For example, using the phrase “at times” makes for a powerful Barnum Effect. |
| F．Therefore, We decided to do a little investigation into how Internet quizzes, magazines and horoscope books seem to know us so well. |
| G．The Barnum Effect is the phenomenon that occurs when individuals believe that personality descriptions apply specifically to them. |
