1 . The problem of robocalls has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don’t know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams (欺诈). We are finally waking up to the severity of the problem by supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late. By the time these “solutions” (解决方案) become widely available, scammers will have moved onto cleverer means. In the near future, it’s not just going to be the number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you’re hearing is actually real.
That’s because there are a number of powerful voice manipulation (处理) and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year’s I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a convincing human-sounding voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book a reservation without detection.
These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason that robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than precision. A decade of data breaches (数据侵入) of personal information has led to a situation where scammers can easily learn your mother’s name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they’re able to carry out individually targeted campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller’s, tricking you into “confirming” your address, mother’s name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be the worst hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice manipulation technologies may weaken that gradually.
We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone carriers and consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications — using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, which can be tied to your identity.
Credibility is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going to get harder from here on out.
1. How does the author feel about the solutions to problem of robocalls?| A．Panicked. |
| B．Confused. |
| C．Embarrassed. |
| D．Disappointed. |
| A．Honesty is the best policy. |
| B．Technologies can be double-edged. |
| C．There are more solutions than problems. |
| D．Credibility holds the key to development. |
2 . In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have agreed that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences leads to some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and more. The historian Francis Cole argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the cruelty of the instant and by the boredom of an unending now”.
It has been proved that people have a bias (偏向) towards the present, focusing on loud attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves or community. In business, this bias surfaces as short-sighted decisions. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it translates into the unwillingness to make small sacrifices (牺牲) today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, or satisfying some other near-term desires.
These biased perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. People’s hesitancy to delay satisfaction is the most obvious example, but there are others. One of them is about how the most accessible information in the present affects decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming.”Another is that loud and urgent matters are given too much importance, making people ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when a pop star draws far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.
As a psychologist once joked, if aliens (外星人) wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships; they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective “poor memory”, and each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with insect-covered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect population has dropped dramatically.
1. The author quotes Francis Cole mainly to ________.| A．draw a comparison | B．introduce a topic |
| C．evaluate a statement | D．highlight a problem |
| A．Far-sighted thinking matters to humans. |
| B．Humans tend to make long-term sacrifices. |
| C．Current policies facilitate future decision-making. |
| D．Bias towards the present helps reduce near-term desires. |
3 . Supermarkets have long been suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to work or visit. For more than a decade, they have been under attack from e-commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, and accused of contributing to climate change.
Supermarkets can technically be defined as giants housing 15,000 to 60,000 different products. The revolutionary idea of a self-service grocery, where people could hunt and gather food from aisles rather than asking a clerk to fetch items from behind a counter, first came about in America. There is some debate about which was the very first, but over the years a consensus has built around King Kullen Supermarket, founded in New York in 1930.
For some 300 years, Americans had fed themselves from small stores and public markets. Shopping for food involved mud, noisy chickens, clouds of flies, nasty smells, bargaining, and getting short-changed. The supermarket imitated the Fordist factory, with its emphasis on efficiency and standardization, and reimagined it as a place to buy food. Supermarkets may not feel cutting-edge now, but they were a revolution in distribution at the time. They were such strange marvels that, on her first official state visit to the United States in 1957, Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ insisted on an impromptu (即兴的) tour of a suburban-Maryland Giant Food.
The typical supermarket layout has barely changed over the past 90 years. Most stores open with flowers, fruit and vegetables at the front as a breath of freshness to arouse our appetite. Meanwhile, they keep the milk, eggs, and other daily basics all the way back so you’ll travel through as much of the store as possible, and be tempted along the way.
In the early days, as the supermarket multiplied, so did our suspicion of it. We have long feared that this “revolution in distribution” uses corporate black magic on our appetite. The book The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957, warned that supermarkets were putting women in a “hypnoidal trance (催眠恍惚状态),” causing them to wander aisles, bumping into boxes and “picking things off shelves at random.”
1. What problem have supermarkets been facing?| A．They are actually on the way to shutdown. |
| B．They have been losing customers and profits. |
| C．They are forced to use e-commerce strategies. |
| D．They have difficulty adapting to climate change. |
| A．It was put forward by King Kullen. |
| B．It originated in the United States. |
| C．It has been under constant debate. |
| D．It proves revolutionary even today. |
| A．They use tricky strategies to promote their business. |
| B．They are going to replace the local groceries entirely. |
| C．They apply corporate black magic to the goods on display. |
| D．They take advantage of the weaknesses of women shoppers. |
4 . The Age of Information is mushrooming, perhaps even bulging. If you tried to download all the data available today, you’d need more than 180 million years to do so. But you are wrong to assume that all this information would stimulate a boost of innovation to match the output of data. Indeed, the last time we found ourselves in a period of significant innovation, pursuing the ideas with the biggest spark, was more than 120 years ago, in a period called the Age of Insight.
Innovations, both big and small, start with a new idea. Often, these ideas occur as a moment of insight-the result of a novel connection in our brains made between existing and new information. Studies show insights involve quiet signals deep in the brain, just under the surface of awareness. Anything that helps us notice quiet signals, such as taking breaks between meetings, only adopting necessary learning approaches or avoiding distractions like social media, can increase the chance of insights. However, it’s becoming more challenging to find those quiet signals with the increasing use of technology, filling every moment with emergencies and an endless supply of content.
Besides, we also want to increase the quality of them-to be able to sort through big new ideas and find the ones that have real value, which can be hard to measure. Launched in 2015, the Eureka Scale(尤里卡量表) allows us to assess the strength of our insight experiences on a five-point scale, which is marked by intense emotions, motivation, memory advantage, aftershocks, and following ideas. The Scale combines these five variables into a single value and allows us to define the importance of a new idea. The level-5 insight, involving the richest emotion, motivation, and lasting impact, holds the greatest significance.
Because insights are one of the best ways to drive engagement, innovation, and behavior change, the Eureka Scale has broad applications for measuring and improving individual and organizational performance. More importantly, it can be used to measure the impact of different kinds of work environments and learning approaches on participants’ growth-both in the moment or afterward.
In order for organizations to benefit from another age of insight, it’s not enough to try to access more data or increase the number of insights we generate. Instead, it’s about making space for the biggest ideas to emerge from all the information. Using the shared language of the Eureka Scale as a way to measure how important ideas are, relative to each other, will enable better decision-making toward practical and competitive outcomes. And if we’re to enter a new age of insight, we must design our environments to allow for the best insight possible to surface.
1. What does the underlined word “bulging” in Paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Stabilizing. |
| B．Exploding. |
| C．Shifting. |
| D．Collapsing. |
| A．By engaging in ongoing social media interactions. |
| B．By relying on technology to receive regular notices. |
| C．By stepping away from computers between meetings. |
| D．By participating in additional training and coaching sessions. |
| A．The Eureka Scale controls the influence of our insights. |
| B．Possessing minimal emotional responses is a level-5 insight. |
| C．Both the quantity and quality of insights are essential to innovation. |
| D．A breakthrough has been made in innovation due to a wealth of information. |
| A．Uncertain. |
| B．Optimistic. |
| C．Unconcerned. |
| D．Dissatisfied. |
5 . Social media does have its shortcomings, and one of those is that it can often seem like everybody is living and winning big — except you.
Someone could have +1000 likes on their pictures or a million views on their videos and still be unhappy.
There are couples that appear happy on social media but behind those photos, they suffer a lot in relationships.
You don’t know what some people go through to come out with the fantastic pictures you envy. The real key players mostly operate behind the scenes but make the most happen. They may look like nobody but they are building their kingdoms while others are getting high on likes and attention. Success is not what is presented on social media.
Be yourself and never give up on yourself. Don’t compare yourself to others. The real champions of social media are those who add value to others, not the ones who show their lifestyle to impress others.
| A．Those ones don’t get documented. |
| B．Some even think it’s a complete show-off. |
| C．Being popular on social media is not everything. |
| D．Self-worth is determined by the number of likes one gets. |
| E．There are couples who post nothing but are in loving relationship. |
| F．It takes tears, sleepless nights, and loads of failure to make it in life. |
| G．You are always flooded with strangers’ images that show the life you long for. |
6 . One overlooked benefit of lab-grown food is that it may help the UK deal with the crisis in housing affordability. As farming is replaced by precision fermentation (发酵) , the significant amount of land currently used for livestock farming(including parts of the green belt) will be freed up for development in places that people actually want to live.
However, we’d take a different lesson from the promise of lab-grown meat. Free-market environmentalism and harnessing the power of innovative technologies — supported by market-based measures like a border-adjusted carbon tax — can successfully tackle the problem of man-made climate change without fundamentally uprooting the way we run society. Saving the planet doesn’t have to cost us the earth.
It is important to acknowledge that certain types of livestock farming may have issues with sustainability and climate change. But it is not true of all farming systems; and the issues that do exist are being dealt with using the latest research into genetics and biotechnology-for example, recent research has shown that certain types of seaweed can reduce methane emissions from cattle to close to zero.
Farmer data also shows that increased sales of milks have not seen a corresponding reduction in dairy sales.
The global food system, consumer choices and climate change are incredibly complex issues, and anyone who proposes simple solutions is almost certainly not in possession of all the relevant facts and data. Livestock are an important part of humanity’s future food needs.
1. Why does lab-grown food help Britain to solve the housing affordability crisis?| A．As farming is replaced by precision fermentation, the level of agricultural development is improved. |
| B．The significant amount of green belts are used for development in places that people actually want to live. |
| C．Lab-grown food is more environmentally friendly and beneficial to human health. |
| D．A large amount of land used for livestock farming will be freed up for residence. |
| A．Free-market environmentalism can change the way society operates. |
| B．Adjusting carbon tax can successfully solve the problem of climate change. |
| C．Adopting the power of innovative technologies is useful for saving the earth. |
| D．Saving the earth requires changing the way society operates. |
| A．obtain | B．exploit | C．inherit | D．develop |
| A．global food issue is so complex that there are no complete research data. |
| B．sustainability and climate change are common problems in agricultural systems. |
| C．some kinds of seaweed can make the amount of methane emitted by cattle ineffective. |
| D．the sales of substitute dairy products increased, and the sales of dairy products decreased accordingly. |
7 . Nowadays, people are increasingly interacting with others in social media environments where algorithms control the flow of social information they see. People’s interactions with online algorithms may affect how they learn from others, with negative consequences including social misperceptions, conflict and the spread of misinformation.
On social media platforms, algorithms are mainly designed to amplify (放大) information that sustains engagement, meaning they keep people clicking on content and coming back to the platforms. There is evidence suggesting that a side effect of this design is that algorithms amplify information people are strongly biased (偏向的) to learn from. We call this information “PRIME”, for prestigious, in-group, moral and emotional information.
In our evolutionary past, biases to learn from PRIME information were very advantageous: Learning from prestigious individuals is efficient because these people are successful and their behavior can be copied. Paying attention to people who violate moral norms is important because punishing them helps the community maintain cooperation. But what happens when PRIME information becomes amplified by algorithms and some people exploit (利用) algorithm amplification to promote themselves? Prestige becomes a poor signal of success because people can fake prestige on social media. News become filled with negative and moral information so that there is conflict rather than cooperation.
The interaction of human psychology and algorithm amplification leads to disfunction because social learning supports cooperation and problem-solving, but social media algorithms are designed to increase engagement. We call it functional mismatch. One of the key outcomes of functional mismatch is that people start to form incorrect perceptions of their social world, which often occurs in the field of politics. Recent research suggests that when algorithms selectively amplify more extreme political views, people begin to think that their political in-group and out-group are more sharply divided than they really are. Such “false polarization” might be an important source of greater political conflict.
So what’s next? A key question is what can be done to make algorithms facilitate accurate human social learning rather than exploit social learning biases. Some research team is working on new algorithm designs that increase engagement while also punishing PRIME information. This may maintain user activity that social media platforms seek, but also make people’s social perceptions more accurate.
1. What are social media algorithms targeted at?| A．Improving social environment. | B．Generating PRIME information. |
| C．Avoiding side effects of social media. | D．Raising the media platform click rate. |
| A．To make an assumption. | B．To illustrate a conclusion. |
| C．To explain a political issue. | D．To present an extreme case. |
| A．boost engagement and regulate amplification |
| B．strengthen social learning and delete biases |
| C．identify biases and punish PRIME information |
| D．monitor media platforms and guarantee users’ privacy |
| A．PRIME information meets with misperceptions |
| B．Algorithms control the flow of social information |
| C．Social media algorithms twist human social learning |
| D．Online algorithm designs face unexpected challenges |
8 . In our information-driven society, shaping our worldview through the media is similar to forming an opinion about someone solely based on a picture of their foot. While the media might not deliberately deceive us, it often fails to provide a comprehensive view of reality.
Consequently, the question arises: Where, then, shall we get our information from if not from the media? Who can we trust? How about experts—people who devote their working lives to understanding their chosen slice of the world? However, even experts can fall prey to the allure of oversimplification, leading to the “single perspective instinct” that hampers(阻碍)our ability to grasp the intricacies of the world.
Simple ideas can be appealing because they offer a sense of understanding and certainty. And it is easy to take off down a slippery slope, from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains, or is the beautiful solution for, lots of other things. The world becomes simple that way.
Yet, when we embrace a singular cause or solution for all problems, we risk oversimplifying complex issues. For instance, championing the concept of equality may lead us to view all problems through the lens of inequality and see resource distribution as the sole panacea. However, such rigidity prevents us from seeing the multidimensional nature of challenges and hinders true comprehension of reality. This “single perspective instinct” ultimately clouds our judgment and restricts our capacity to tackle complex issues effectively.
It saves a lot of time to think like this. You can have opinions and answers without having to learn about a problem from scratch and you can get on with using your brain for other tasks. But it’s not so useful if you like to understand the world. Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you would like to understand reality.
Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, consult people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world. I have been wrong about the world so many times. Sometimes, coming up against reality is what helps me see my mistakes, but often it is talking to, and trying to understand, someone with different ideas.
If this means you don’t have time to form so many opinions, so what? Wouldn’t you rather have few opinions that are right than many that are wrong?
1. What does the underlined word “allure” in Para.2 probably mean?| A．Temptation. | B．Tradition. | C．Convenience. | D．Consequence. |
| A．They meet people’s demand for high efficiency. |
| B．They generate a sense of complete understanding. |
| C．They are raised and supported by multiple experts. |
| D．They reflect the opinions of like-minded individuals. |
| A．Simplifying matters releases energy for human brains. |
| B．Constant tests on our ideas help make up for our weakness. |
| C．A well-founded opinion counts more than many shallow ones. |
| D．People who disagree with us often have comprehensive views. |
| A．Embracing Disagreement: Refusing Overcomplexity |
| B．Simplifying Information: Enhancing Comprehension |
| C．Understanding Differences: Establishing Relationships |
| D．Navigating Complexity: Challenging Oversimplification |
9 . In recent years, researchers from diverse fields have agreed that short-termism is now a significant problem in industrialised societies. The inability to engage with longer-term causes and consequences leads to some of the world’s most serious problems: climate change, biodiversity collapse, and more. The historian Francis Cole argues that the West has entered a period where “only the present exists, a present characterised at once by the cruelty of the instant and by the boredom of an unending now”.
It has been proved that people have a bias (偏向) towards the present, focusing on loud attractions in the moment at the expense of the health, well-being and financial stability of their future selves or community. In business, this bias surfaces as short-sighted decisions. And on slow-burning problems like climate change, it translates into the unwillingness to make small sacrifices (牺牲) today that could make a major difference tomorrow. Instead, all that matters is next quarter’s profit, or satisfying some other near-term desires.
These biased perspectives cannot be blamed on one single cause. It is fair to say, though, that our psychological biases play a major role. People’s hesitancy to delay satisfaction is the most obvious example, but there are others. One of them is about how the most accessible information in the present affects decisions about the future. For instance, you might hear someone say: “It’s cold this winter, so I needn’t worry about global warming.”Another is that loud and urgent matters are given too much importance, making people ignore longer-term trends that arguably matter more. This is when a pop star draws far more attention than, say, gradual biodiversity decline.
As a psychologist once joked, if aliens (外星人) wanted to weaken humanity, they wouldn’t send ships; they would invent climate change. Indeed, when it comes to environmental transformations, we can develop a form of collective “poor memory”, and each new generation can believe the state of affairs they encounter is nothing out of the ordinary. Older people today, for example, can remember a time with insect-covered car windscreens after long drives. Children, on the other hand, have no idea that insect population has dropped dramatically.
1. The author quotes Francis Cole mainly to ________.| A．draw a comparison |
| B．introduce a topic |
| C．evaluate a statement |
| D．highlight a problem |
| A．Climate change has been forgotten. |
| B．Lessons of history are highly valued. |
| C．The human mind is bad at noting slow change. |
| D．Humans are unwilling to admit their shortcomings. |
| A．Far-sighted thinking matters to humans. |
| B．Humans tend to make long-term sacrifices. |
| C．Current policies facilitate future decision-making. |
| D．Bias towards the present helps reduce near-term desires. |
10 . In the second half of the twentieth century, many countries of the South (发展中国家) began to send students to the industrialized countries for further education. They urgently needed supplies of highly trained personnel to implement a concept of development based on modernization. But many of these students decided to stay on in the developed countries when they had finished their training. At the same time, many professionals who did return home but no longer felt at ease there also decided to go back to the countries where they had studied.
In the 1960s, some Latin American countries tried to solve this problem by setting up special “return” programmes to encourage their professionals to come back home. These programmes received support from international bodies such as the International Organization for Migration, which in 1974 enabled over 1, 600 qualified scientists and technicians to return to Latin America.
In the 1980s and 1990s, “temporary return” programmes were set up in order to make the best use of trained personnel occupying strategic positions in the developed countries. This gave rise to the United Nations Development Programme’s Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriate (移居国外的) Nationals, which encourages technicians and scientists to work in their own countries for short periods. But the brain drain (人才流失) from these countries may well increase in response to the new laws of the international market in knowledge.
Recent studies forecast that the most developed countries are going to need more and more highly qualified professionals around twice as many as their educational systems will be able to produce, or so it is thought. As a result, there is an urgent need for developing countries which send students abroad to give preference to fields where they need competent people to give muscle to their own institutions, instead of encouraging the training of people who may not come back because there are no professional outlets for them. And the countries of the South must not be content with institutional structures that simply take back professionals sent abroad, they must introduce flexible administrative procedures to encourage them to return. If they do not do this, the brain drain is bound to continue.
1. Which of the following is NOT correct according to the passage?| A．The developing countries believe that sending students to the industrialized countries is a good way to meet their own needs for modernization. |
| B．The South American countries have been sending students to developed countries since the 1920s. |
| C．Many people trained abroad remain in the developed countries instead of coming back to serve their home countries. |
| D．The International Organization for Migration successfully helped more than 1,600 professionals return to their own countries in a single year. |
| A．keep their present administrative procedures so as to ensure that their students return after graduation |
| B．cooperate more effectively with international organizations |
| C．set up more return programmes under the guidance of the UN |
| D．send students abroad in the fields where their knowledge is more likely to be made full use of in their own countries |
| A．as long as the developed countries need more qualified professionals than they can educate domestically |
| B．as long as the developing countries are content with their present institutional structures |
| C．unless those countries stop sending large number of students to be trained abroad |
| D．if the governments fail to make administrative adjustments concerning the return procedures of their professionals |
| A．The Brain Drain of the Developing Countries |
| B．Knowledge Transfer |
| C．The Talents from the Developing Countries |
| D．The Failure of Development Programmes |
