2 . Twenty years ago, I was invited to join a poker game made up of all middle-aged men. That game became an essential part of my life and it evolved with the group. We used to start at 7 p. m. with wine and play until 2 a. m. Now there is no wine, and we quit before midnight. The smoke of cigarettes is long gone. The food is better—over two decades we’ve gone from chips to homemade vegetable salad. All of these win favor with my wife when I go to play poker.

When the pandemic (疫情) arrived, we switched to online games. We downloaded a poker app on our phones and looked at those nine boxes containing our heads on our computer screens. The app dealt with all nine players at the same time, so the online version was much faster. Despite the efficiency, the app presented problems. It took all our concentration to keep track, on multiple screens, of what was going on with the game. The conversation didn’t really happen. It felt like any online poker game, the kind played with strangers. So I hated this way of playing.

When we finally met each other for our live game after a two-year break, we were excited. However, at our poker game, we learned one of our guys died of cancer without telling any of us he was sick. Actually, we once found Bert looked a bit thin and a bit tired. Then he was gone. According to Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford University, men are less likely to discuss their personal affairs and opinions directly and honestly. It’s the reason why men are more likely to have mental problems.

So friendships with women are the perfect complement to male friendships. I have a wife to confide in (向……透露秘密), and a few female friends I regularly meet for lunch. I’m just really glad to have both types of friendships. I can meet my female friends for a nice lunch and a glass of wine. Then head off to poker.

3 . People who keep chickens as pets or barnyard animals tend to be quite passionate about them. Similar to those who keep cats and dogs as animal friends, chicken owners love to spoil their little ones. If that means building tiny amusement parks to keep them happy, then that’s exactly what they will do.

Chickens have more personality than many people give them credit for. Like humans, chickens love to have fun, explore, and just kind of check stuff out.

What happens if chickens get bored?

Bored chickens tend to engage in bad behaviors. These can include pecking at and fighting with one another and pulling out each other’s feathers.

Part of keeping and caring for chickens (or any animal for that matter) includes making sure they have everything they need to be happy. That includes entertainment and things to keep their days interesting.

One method is to hang up a piece of cabbage. Not only does this keep the chickens entertained, but it also gives them a healthy source of nourishment.

There is another fun toy you can build for your chickens, and all you need is some old bicycle tires. Chicken merry-go-rounds are about to become all the rage (风靡一时) in chicken society. To do this, all you need to do is remove the wheel from a bike. Then lay the wheel out over top something so the chickens are able to spin and ride on top. The chickens seem to know how to jump right on and go for a ride. They might not react like a human on a rollercoaster (过山车), but their behavior tends to show it is an enjoyable experience for them. The wheels can be spread out through your garden, backyard, or wherever your chickens like to roam. They help make their days more interesting, fun, and unique!

5 . Flinging brightly coloured objects around a screen at high speed is not what computers’ central processing units were designed for. So manufacturers of arcade machines invented the graphics-processing unit (GPU), a set of circuits to handle video games’ visuals in parallel to the work done by the central processor. The GPU’s ability to speed up complex tasks has since found wider uses: video editing, cryptocurrency mining and most recently, the training of artificial intelligence.

AI is now disrupting the industry that helped bring it into being. Every part of entertainment stands to be affected by generative AI, which digests inputs of text, image, audio or video to create new outputs of the same. But the games business will change the most, argues Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital (VC) firm. Games interactivity requires them to be stuffed with laboriously designed content: consider the 30 square miles of landscape or 60 hours of music in “Red Dead Redemption 2”, a recent cowboy adventure. Enlisting AI assistants to churn it out could drastically shrink timescales and budgets.

AI represents an “explosion of opportunity” and could drastically change the landscape of game development. Making a game is already easier than it was: nearly 13,000 titles were published last year on Steam, a games platform, almost double the number in 2017. Gaming may soon resemble the music and video industries in which most new content on Spotify or YouTube is user-generated. One games executive predicts that small firms will be the quickest to work out what new genres are made possible by AI. Last month Raja Koduri, an executive at Intel, left the chip maker to found an AI-gaming startup.

Don’t count the big studios out, though. If they can release half a dozen high-quality titles a year instead of a couple, it might chip away at the hit-driven nature of their business, says Josh Chapman of Konvoy, a gaming focused VC firm. A world of more choices also favors those with big marketing budgets. And the giants may have better answers to the mounting copyright questions around AI. If generative models have to be trained on data to which the developer has the rights, those with big back-catalogues will be better placed than startups. Trent Kaniuga, an artist who has worked on games like “Fortnite”, said last month that several clients had updated their contracts to ban AI-generated art.

If the lawyers don’t intervene, unions might. Studios diplomatically refer to AI assistants as “co-pilots”, not replacements for humans.

9 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。

10 . Here’s an idyllic scene: a small village where the sun always shines crops always grow and your friends drop by to sweep your yard to the sound of guitar music. Animals do what they are told there is no disease and lending folks a helping hand makes you richer and wiser. Welcome to Farm Ville --- current population 69m and rising fast.

“It reminds me of my childhood,” says one player, Lia Curran, 37, a chemist from London. “Right now I’m growing wheat and poinsettia, I’ve got a small orchard and I’m keeping some chickens and some cows. I like having the animals. It’s comfortable.”

Curran’s young animals, however, are nothing more than a collection of computer-controlled cartoons. Farm Ville is an online computer game built into the social networking site Facebook and is described by its players as “addictive”. Launched last June by Zynga Game Network, Farm Ville now has more players than Twiter’s entire user base --- or more than the population of the UK. The players are largely women over the age of 35.

Jenny Glyn, 33, a London housewife, started playing in September. “I had a look at a friend’s farm and was hooked” she says. “My first motivation was to overtake her, but I did that pretty quickly. Now there’s something satisfying about growing crops.”

Farm Ville intellectually unites the worlds of social networking and gaming. Players are given a patch of ground with six fields, “cash”, a few seeds and a plough and have to build up wealth, skills and neighbors to create bigger, better, richer farms.

Inviting your online friends to play means you earn more and get free gifts; you rise rapidly through the first levels but once hooked have to work harder and harder with no final level or goal in sight. “It’s very moreish,” says Curran. She hasn’t yet paid real-world money to advance in the game, but her friends do. One buys extra virtual currency at the exchange rate of $240 (￡145) in Farm Ville for $40 (￡24) in the real world.

“I’d expanded on Farm Ville as much as I could, but I just wanted a pond and some bushes and trees around it,” says the woman, who is too embarrassed to be named. “I didn’t tell my husband I’d paid real money because he’d think I’m mad. But then he did keep me waiting in the car outside our house while he harvested his raspberries.”

Brian Dudley, chief executive at Broadway Lodge, an addiction treatment centre, warns that this sort of obsessive play can lead to an addiction as severe as gambling.