1 . Imagine if you could look into the future and see yourself 50 years from now. You could see the wrinkles on your face, how your hair would gray, and how the very shape of your face would change after decades of life. You would be able to see how you might look to your future grandchildren.
It sounds like something out of a fairytale. But a viral “Aged” filter (滤镜) on TikTok is allowing users to look into the face of their future selves.
The new filter uses AI to estimate what your face will look like as you age, and dermatologists (皮肤学家) on TikTok are calling it “very accurate”. But the response, especially among young people using the filter, shows a deep fear within Gen Z of getting, and more importantly, looking old.
What does the filter do?
The filter, which has over 9 million videos on TikTok, provides a picture of users’ faces with realistic aging, including wrinkles, crow’s feet and often gray hair. The filter looks different for each person and uses AI to enhance existing facial features, like under-eye bags or wrinkles, to estimate how their face will age.
TikTok is not the first app to release an aging filter. Snapchat released a similar filter back in 2019, and users similarly used FaceApp to age themselves.
Even Kylie Jenner immediately joined in the trend saying simply “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.”
Others disagree about how much the filter ages them, comparing their aged face to other users. Some have used the filter on old photos of their parents or celebrities and compared the filter’s results to how they look today.
Others, however, have taken a more loving approach to their future selves. Many users express shock at how similar they look to relatives and others express excitement for the years ahead.
1. What is the function of the first paragraph?A.To supply a scientific fact. | B.To arouse the reader’s interest. |
C.To provide a good example. | D.To share the theory of the filter. |
A.Their ages don’t really change. |
B.There’s no real difference between them. |
C.“Looking old” sounds more polite. |
D.“Getting old” sounds a little more boring. |
A.To introduce another opinion. | B.To try to please her true fans. |
C.To emphasize the wide use. | D.To prove the truth of the technique. |
A.Angrily. | B.Similarly. | C.Excitedly. | D.Differently. |
2 . Ancient humans were hunter-gatherers. They followed herds of animals on the hunt and gathered eatable plants as well. Starting around 10,000 years ago, humans in a handful of regions around the world discovered agriculture. People discovered that certain seeds could be planted and crops could be reliably grown. It is impossible to overstate how important the change was. Some time after that, people in the same regions began to domesticate animals, keeping cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats in controlled conditions, eating them and using their hides.
Even fairly primitive agriculture can produce fifty times more caloric energy than hunting and gathering does. The very basis of human life is how much energy we can gain from food; with agriculture and animal domestication, it was possible for families to grow much larger and overall population levels to rise dramatically.
One of the noteworthy aspects of this change is that hunter-gatherers actually had much more leisure time than farmers did. Archaeologists (考古学家) have determined that hunter-gatherers generally only“worked”for a few hours a day, and spent the rest of their time in leisure activities. Meanwhile, farmers always worked incredibly hard for very long hours. In many places in the ancient world, there were groups of people who remained hunter-gatherers despite knowing about agriculture, and it was quite possible they did that because they saw no particular advantage in adopting agriculture. There were also many areas that practiced both—right up until the modern time, many farmers tried to forage in wild areas near their farms.
Agriculture was developed in a few different places completely independently. According to archaeological evidence, agriculture did not start in one place and then spread; it started in a few distinct areas and then spread from those areas, sometimes meeting in the middle. For example, agriculture developed independently in China by 5000 BCE, and of course agriculture in the Americas (starting in western South America) had nothing to do with its earlier invention in the Fertile Crescent.
1. What’s the great change of early humans?A.Increasing population. | B.Keeping pet animals. |
C.Learning to plant. | D.Using the hides. |
A.It employed more time and efforts. |
B.It was less productive than hunting. |
C.It rewarded people with fewer gains. |
D.It needed more skills and techniques. |
A.Grow plants. | B.Exchange goods. |
C.Gather together. | D.Hunt for food. |
A.Agriculture spread from one place to another. |
B.China made great contributions to agriculture. |
C.Agriculture developed separately in the world. |
D.Earlier inventions had something in common with agriculture. |
3 . Three young American men were on a crowded train when they came across a dangerous robber. Ignoring their personal safety, they rushed the robber and controlled him. Only some people seem capable of this sudden form of heroism (英雄主义). Why some men rise to the occasion — and others don’t — has been a bit difficult to explain. Psychologists have explored this question through biological and personality psychology.
Of course, heroism and courage can appear in many forms, and men and women risk their reputation (名声), health, and social recognition to do what they think is right. When it comes to physically risky bravery, people assume that men will take the lead. There are sound biological reasons for this fixed image. One of the most common fears in men is that they will be viewed as a coward (懦夫), and a man who fails to display physical courage will suffer damage to his reputation in a way that a woman will not. Throughout history, gaining a higher position among peers (同龄人) has been the ticket that needs to get punched for a man to attract future wife and father children.
People tend to have an idea of what heroes are like. When rating (打分) the personalities of movie heroes, participants expected them to be more hard-working, open to experience, approachable, and emotionally stable than the average person. But some studies suggest that people who show heroic behavior usually have the personalities of madmen: risk-taking, coolness under stress, and an eagerness to take over in social situations.
The study of the relationship between personality and heroism is at an early stage. Psychologists are still at a loss to predict in advance who will heroically step up when needed. Often, the hero is an otherwise ordinary person who finds himself on an extraordinary occasion. Meanwhile, some individuals trained to behave heroically might hesitate in a dangerous situation. Various factors like identities, occasions and specific training will influence the final heroism. Hopefully, the right mix of occasion and personalities enable courage to carry the day.
1. How is the topic introduced in the first paragraph?A.By presenting an idea. | B.By giving an example. |
C.By making a comparison. | D.By drawing a conclusion. |
A.Be bought. | B.Be returned. | C.Be abandoned. | D.Be gained. |
A.Heroes are born, not made. |
B.Heroic acts only appear in a specific crisis. |
C.Individual personality is not a dependable sign of heroism. |
D.Heroism is a phenomenon influenced by numerous factors. |
A.How Are Heroes Trained? | B.Why Are Heroes Important? |
C.Who Are the True Heroes? | D.What Makes a Person Heroic? |
4 . Teachers worried about students turning in essays written by a popular artificial intelligence chatbot now have a new tool of their own.
Edward Tian, a computer science major at Princeton University, has built an App called GPTZero to detect whether a text is written by Chat GPT, which is a popular chatbot that has caused fears over its possibility for immoral uses in American academic circles. His motivation to create the computer program was to fight what he sees as an increase in AI plagiarism (剽窃). Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, there have been reports of students using the language model to pass off AI-written assignments as their own. Many teachers have reached out to him after he released GPTZero, telling him about the positive results they’ve seen from testing it.
To determine whether an essay is written by a computer program, GPTZero uses two indicators: “confusion” and “burstiness (突发性)”. The first indicator measures the complexity of text; if GPTZero is confused by the text, then it has a high complexity and it’s more likely to be human-written. However, if the text is more familiar to GPTZero — because it’s been trained on such data — then it will have low complexity and therefore is more likely to be AI-generated. Besides, the second indicator compares the variations of sentences. Humans tend to write with greater burstiness, for example, with some longer or complex sentences alongside shorter ones. AI sentences tend to be more uniform.
In a demonstration video, Tian compared the App’s analysis of a story in The New Yorker and a Linked In post written by ChatGPT. It successfully distinguished writing between human and AI. However, GPTZero isn’t foolproof, as some users have reported when putting it to the test. He said he’s still working to improve the model’s accuracy.
Tian is not opposed to the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. GPTZero is “not meant to be a tool to stop these technologies from being used,” he said. “But with any new technologies, we need to be able to adopt it responsibly and we need to have protections.”
1. What have some students done since ChatGPT was released?A.They have built language models from ChatGPT. |
B.They have copied AI-written text from ChatGPT |
C.They have accessed their assignments through ChatGPT. |
D.They have passed their writing exams through ChatGPT. |
A.The more uniform the text is, the more likely it is to be AI-generated. |
B.The less complex the text is, the more likely it is to be human-written. |
C.GPTZero sometimes confuses human-written texts with AI-generated texts. |
D.GPTZero is more familiar with human-written texts than with AI-generated texts. |
A.User-friendly. | B.Time-efficient. |
C.Perfectly legal. | D.Completely reliable. |
A.Favorable. | B.Disapproving. | C.Objective. | D.Ambiguous. |
5 . Huge health care bills, long emergency-room waits and the inability to find a primary care physician just scratch the surface of the problems that patients face daily.
Primary care should be the backbone of any health care system. Countries with appropriate primary care resources score highly when it comes to health outcomes and cost. The U.S. takes the opposite approach by emphasizing the specialist rather than the primary care physician.
A recent study analyzed the providers who treat Medicare beneficiaries (老年医保受惠人). The startling finding was that the average Medicare patient saw a total of seven doctors—two primary care physicians and five specialists—in a given year. Contrary to popular belief, the more physicians taking care of you don’t guarantee better care. Actually, increasing fragmentation of care results in a corresponding rise in cost and medical errors.
How did we let primary care slip so far? The key is how doctors are paid. Most physicians are paid whenever they perform a medical service. The more a physician does, regardless of quality or outcome, the better he’s reimbursed (返还费用). Moreover, the amount a physician receives leans heavily toward medical or surgical procedures. A specialist who performs a procedure in a 30-minute visit can be paid three times more than a primary care physician using that same 30 minutes to discuss a patient’s disease. Combining this fact with annual government threats to indiscriminately (任意地) cut reimbursements, physicians are faced with no choice but to increase quantity to boost income.
Primary care physicians who refuse to compromise quality are either driven out of business or to cash-only practices, further contributing to the decline of primary care.
Medical students are not blind to this scenario. They see how heavily the reimbursement deck is stacked against primary care. The recent numbers show that since 1997, newly graduated U. S. medical students who choose primary care as a career have declined by 50%. This trend results I emergency rooms being overwhelmed with patients without regular doctors.
How do we fix this problem?It starts with reforming the physician reimbursement system. Remove the pressure for primary care physicians to squeeze in more patients per hour, and reward them for optimally (最佳的) managing their diseases and practicing evidence-based medicine. Make primary care more attractive to medical students by forgiving students loans for those who choose primary care as a career and reconciling the marked difference between specialist and primary care physician salaries.
We’re at a point where primary care is needed more than ever. Within a few years, the first wave of the 76 million Baby Boomers will become eligible for Medicare. Patients older than 85, who need chronic care most, will rise by 50% this decade.
Who will be there to treat them?
1. We learn from the passage that people tend to believe that ________.A.the more costly the medicine, the more effective the cure |
B.seeing more doctors may result in more diagnostic errors |
C.visiting the same doctor on a regular basis ensures good health |
D.the more doctors a patient sees, the better |
A.increase their income by working overtime |
B.improve their expertise and service |
C.see more patients at the expense of quality |
D.make various deals with specialists |
A.Bridge the salary gap between specialist and primary care physicians. |
B.Extend primary care to patients with chronic diseases. |
C.Recruit more medical students by offering them loans. |
D.Reduce the tuition of students who choose primary care as their major. |
A.The Health Care in Trouble | B.The Imbalance System |
C.The Declining Number of Doctors | D.The Ever-rising Health Care Costs |
6 . The tales and the tone vary, and the story-tellers are “journal influencers”, mostly young women reading their teenage diaries to audiences online. One influencer, Carrie Walker, draws 1. 2 million views for a half hour read online. And sharing secrets presents commercial opportunity: selling notebooks and pens on shopping website. or copies of diaries on auction (拍卖) website.
Sally Bayley of the University of Oxford, author of The Private Life of the Diary, regards sharing diaries on social media as the contrary of diary keeping. saying the journal is an internal territory, inseparable (分不开的) from privacy. Yet diaries have also long been shared. In the 19th century, when keeping a journal rose in popularity, diary-sharing then was “extremely common”. Diaries were read aloud or sent to friends. “That distinction between public and private really doesn’t hold at all, ” says Professor Huff. Some diaries served practical uses, sharing advice on self-improvement, pregnancy or childbirth. British women in a strange land often sent diaries back home. They were creating an extended family through these diaries.
Many journal videos also create a sense of community. They share stories of loneliness of struggles with body image or early romantic trouble. They make fun of the improper expectations of youth and the disappointments of adulthood, with the ear of sympathetic strangers.
The co-existence of secrecy and celebration was perhaps best understood by Anais Nin, a 20th-century French-born American whose diary was an exercise in self-creation. “I’m in my journal, and in my journal only. Nothing shows on the outside. Perhaps I don’t exist except as a fantastic character in this story. ”
And Nin published her journals. Its content won her fame that her fiction had not. Her confessional (忏悔的) texts broke through the thin screen between public and private. The diaries are a masterclass in broadcast secrecy.
“We write to taste life twice.” Nin wrote, “in the moment and in reflection. ” She spent her last years reading her diaries to crowds. Like today's influencers, she knew that reflection tastes much sweeter in company.
1. How does Carrie Walker attract viewers?A.By advertising her stories, | B.By reading her journals online. |
C.By telling stories in a humorous way. | D.By influencing others to write journals. |
A.It won’t break the privacy of journals. | B.It should be forbidden on social media |
C.It develops one’s sense of community. | D.It's an age-long custom to observe. |
A.She shared her advice on exercising in a group. |
B.She criticized her parents’ unrealistic expectation. |
C.She publicly reflected on her body image problem. |
D.She regretted her past mistakes through the journal. |
A.Writing Journals Is a New Trend | B.Media Platforms Set Stages for Writers |
C.Who Are the Personal Journals Written for? | D.What Breaks the Barrier of Public and Private? |
7 . For a place with a reputation for bottling up feelings, Britain is remarkably honest about mental health problems. The British are more likely than people in any other rich country to think that mental illness is a disease like any other and that support should be sought. Only the Swedes hold the idea that a history of mental health problems should not disqualify someone from public office.
Much of the rich world has struggled with rising rates of self-reported mental health problems. But the numbers in Britain are frightening. Around 4.5 million Britons were in contact with mental health services in 2021-2022, which was almost 1 million higher than five years ago. A National Health Service (NHS) survey in 2023 found that one in five 8-to 16-year-olds in England had a probable mental disorder, up from one in eight in 2017. In 17-to 19-year-olds the figure had increased from one in ten to one in four.
It is good that people do not feel they must bottle things up. Awareness of mental health has raised public knowledge of mental health disorders and revealed that many Britons’ needs are not met, but it has caused damage, too.
Despite the best intentions, campaigns intended to raise awareness are leading some people to combine normal responses to life’s difficulties with mental health disorders. Special treatment creates motivations for people to seek diagnoses (诊断) and to medicalise problems unnecessarily. The need to treat people with milder conditions competes with care for those who have the most severe ones. Medicalising mild worry may not benefit patients; instead, normal teaching is just as good for mental health. But the great harm from over diagnosis is to those who most need help.
Britons’ approaches to mental health require several changes. More money should go on research so that individuals are treated appropriately. More time and effort should be given to those most in need of help. All suffering should be taken seriously, but a diagnosis is not always in someone’s best interests.
1. What is Britons’ attitude towards mental health problems?A.Conservative. | B.Uncaring. | C.Critical. | D.Open. |
A.By listing examples. | B.By analyzing the causes. |
C.By presenting the statistics. | D.By referring to professionals’ views. |
A.Ignorance of milder mental cases. | B.Over-medicalisation of normal stress. |
C.The lack of teaching in mental health. | D.Unnecessary treatment for most diseases. |
A.Britain’s Mental Health Mess | B.New Social Crisis in Britain |
C.Reform in Britons’ Mental Health | D.Britons’ Rising Mental Disorders |
TO: Educational Staff
Re: School Choices 2023-24
Date: April 20, 2024
Dear Staff,
We have finally completed our report, analyzing school choice data so that we can plan for the future. Surveys were sent to all the parents/guardians of students in our schools, from Kindergarten to Grade 12. We heard from a good percentage of families - 89% of them responded. It is important to note that a result like this means that our families are really invested in education and want to improve the system.
I’ve included one chart from the report. The rest of it is available on our website. There is nothing further you need to do, other than to look at the charts if you want to.
A committee has already been formed to figure out what to do with the data we now have. This committee includes board trustees, the chair of the school board, and several staff from the head office, as well as principals and teachers from both elementary and secondary schools.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Colleen So
Chair, Ohio First School Board
School Choice by Grade
A.The number of grades. | B.The action they’ll be taking. |
C.The rest of the report. | D.The school board leader's name. |
A.To follow the rules that are in place. |
B.To keep the community interested. |
C.To carry out some of the big changes. |
D.To decide on what to do with the findings. |
A.The lower the grade, the more educated they were. |
B.The higher the grade, the fewer responses received. |
C.The older the student, the more likely they want to learn online. |
D.The younger the student, the more they appreciate being online. |
9 . Marketers are often very conscious of the ways that their advertisements can backfire or “go wrong” in the eyes of their audiences. However, this rarely happens and there are virtually no cases where advertising has resulted in a decline in sales.
A psychological reason can account for the cause. It has to do with the mere exposure effect, which basically means that the more we’re exposed to something, the more we like it. The mere exposure effect is commonly attributed to Robert Zajonc for the important research that he conducted in the 1960s. His research, and the research of many others, shows that we tend to develop a liking or positive feeling for symbols or items that we see repeatedly.
When we take the mere exposure effect into account, it becomes clear why advertising rarely has a negative impact. Advertising helps to put brand assets (资产), like your logo and color and product and brand characters, in front of people, and the more these assets get in front of people, the more likely people are to develop positive feelings toward these assets and your brand. In fact, the impact of the mere exposure effect has been shown specifically in studies using advertisements, and they have found that students rated a banner ad more favorably when they had previously appeared as a pop up on their computer.
In order to fully take advantage of the mere exposure effect in marketing, marketers should make sure to use recognizable elements within their advertising. In addition, they should make sure that these elements align with what the customers see when they see the product. This will ensure that your customers will have an easier time noticing the product on the store shelves or on the computer screen and that they will have some familiarity with the brand.
The mere exposure effect is just one of many psychological biases that people use to simplify how they go about the world. Feel free to contact us or sign up for our newsletter to stay in touch with the latest insights in marketing psychology.
1. Which statement will Robert Zajonc probably agree with?A.A familiar song becomes more appealing. |
B.We often follow trends to make daily purchases. |
C.People are often drawn to something unfamiliar. |
D.Advertising with celebrities can increase product sales. |
A.Advertisement creates instant brand love. |
B.Logos seen often in advertisements are rarely liked. |
C.The banner ad has a significant attraction for consumers. |
D.Advertisement uses exposure to develop brand appreciation. |
A.Contribute to. | B.Correspond to. | C.Differ from. | D.Depend on. |
A.A business webpage. | B.A news report. | C.A psychology textbook. | D.A marketer’s diary. |
10 . Is art boring? It’s not, really. I don’t think so, at least. But there’s a problem with how we look at art, how we approach it.
Museums are formal and strangely dry. There’s no embrace. Barriers prevent us from leaving the path set by the curator (馆长). Glass traps the paintings permanently in their frames – an invisible barrier that prevents us from ever getting close to the art, from touching it, feeling it. Guides and guards are constantly observing us, stopping us from taking photos, or using selfie sticks, or talking too loud. Museums have too many rules. And they’ve made our art boring.
We should be able to see art, to sometimes touch it. How can we feel any connection to the world? Art is a way to connect to the world, and yet so much of our art (and it is our art, not theirs, not yours — but ours) is unreachable.
Why can’t we laugh in museums? Why can’t we take silly selfies in front of art, our tongues sticking out, our hands in the air? Art is not boring and yet, we as a society, have made it so. We’ve trapped incredible artists behind glass boxes, with random rules governing noise levels, lights, flashes, sounds, photos, selfies, pens & pencils.
I love art. I think it has this incredible power to change our world. It can move us — as individuals, or as a collective society. Art is so often a window to something else. And yet we’ve allowed museums and galleries and collectors to prevent us from ever opening those windows.
Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy art museums. There are many fantastic ones around the world. And without so many wonderful curators and collectors, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy much of the art that is created -the masterpieces and the newer, more contemporary (and sometimes crazy) art. But at the same time, we’ ve allowed museums too much control.
They’ve taken our art. They’ve controlled our world. And our world, our art — it’s not meant to be controlled. It’s meant to be experienced — however that may be. It’s an individual, personal choice. Let’s take back our art, our museums. And take some selfies.
1. According to the writer, how may visitors to museums feel?A.Interested. | B.Unwelcome. | C.Excited. | D.Ashamed. |
A.The writer believes that art should never be kept in museums. |
B.The writer is losing his love of art due to museums’ policies. |
C.The writer believes museums are taking away the power of art. |
D.The writer believes that art should be replaced by something else. |
A.Help me. | B.Control me. | C.Misunderstand me. | D.Frighten me. |
A.All of us can create art. | B.Museums are of little use. |
C.Admission to museums should be free. | D.Museums should give visitors more freedom. |