In its early history, Chicago had floods frequently, especially in the spring, making the streets so muddy that people, horses, and carts got stuck. An old joke that was popular at the time went something like this: A man is stuck up to his waist in a muddy Chicago street. Asked if he needs help, he replies, “No, thanks. I've got a good horse under me.”
The city planner decided to build an underground drainage (排水) system, but there simply wasn't enough difference between the height of the ground level and the water level. The only two options were to lower the Chicago River or raise the city.
An engineer named Ellis Chesbrough convinced me the city that it had no choice but to build the pipes above ground and then cover them with dirt. This raised the level of the city's streets by as much as 12 feet.
This of course created a new problem: dirt practically buried the first floors of every building in Chicago. Building owners were faced with a choice: either change the first floors of their buildings into basements, and the second stories into main floors, or hoist the entire buildings to meet the new street level. Small wood-frame buildings could be lifted fairly easily. But what about large, heavy structures like Tremont Hotel, which was a six-story brick building?
That's where George Pullman came in. He had developed some house-moving skills successfully. To lift a big structure like the Tremont Hotel, Pullman would place thousands of jackscrews (螺旋千斤顶) beneath the building's foundation. One man was assigned to operate each section of roughly 10 jackscrews. At Pullman's signal each man turned his jackscrew the same amount at the same time, thereby raising the building slowly and evenly. Astonishingly, the Tremont Hotel stay open during the entire operation, and many of its guests didn't even notice anything was happening. Some people like to say that every problem has a solution. But in Chicago's early history, every engineering solution seemed to create a new problem. Now that Chicago's waste water was draining efficiently into the Chicago River, the city's next step was to clean the polluted river.
1.The author mentions the joke to show ______.
A. horses were fairly useful in Chicago
B. Chicago's streets were extremely muddy
C. Chicago was very dangerous in the spring
D. the Chicago people were particularly humorous
2.The city planners were convinced by Ellis Chesbrough to_______.
A. get rid of the street dirt B. lower the Chicago River
C. fight against heavy floods D. build the pipes above ground
3.The underlined word “hoist”in Paragraph 4 means “_______”.
A. change B. lift
C. repair D. decorate
4.What can we conclude about the moving operation of the Tremont Hotel?
A. It went on smoothly as intended.
B. It interrupted the business of the hotel.
C. It involved Pullman turning ten jackscrews.
D. It separated the building from its foundation.
5.The passage is mainly about the early Chicago's ______.
A. popular life styles and their influences
B. environmental disasters and their causes
C. engineering problems and their solutions
D. successful businessmen and their achievements
As Internet users become more dependent on the Internet to store information, are people remember less? If you know your computer will save information, why store it in your own personal memory, your brain? Experts are wondering if the Internet is changing what we remember and how.
In a recent study, Professor Betsy Sparrow conducted some experiments. She and her research team wanted to know the Internet is changing memory. In the first experiment, they gave people 40 unimportant facts to type into a computer. The first group of people understood that the computer would save the information. The second group understood that the computer would not save it. Later, the second group remembered the information better. People in the first group knew they could find the information again, so they did not try to remember it.
In another experiment, the researchers gave people facts to remember, and told them where to find the information on the Internet. The information was in a specific computer folder (文件夹). Surprisingly, people later remember the folder location (位置) better than the facts. When people use the Internet, they do not remember the information. Rather, they remember how to find it. This is called “transactive memory (交互记忆)”
According to Sparrow, we are not becoming people with poor memories as a result of the Internet. Instead, computer users are developing stronger transactive memories; that is, people are learning how to organize huge quantities of information so that they are able to access it at a later date. This doesn’t mean we are becoming either more or less intelligent, but there is no doubt that the way we use memory is changing.
1.The passage begins with two questions to ________.
A.introduce the main topic B.show the author’s attitude
C.describe how to use the Internet D.explain how to store information
2.What can we learn about the first experiment?
A.Sparrow’s team typed the information into a computer.
B.The two groups remembered the information equally well.
C.The first group did not try to remember the formation.
D.The second group did not understand the information.
3.In transactive memory, people ________.
A.keep the information in mind
B.change the quantity of information
C.organize information like a computer
D.remember how to find the information
4.What is the effect of the Internet according to Sparrow's research?
A.We are using memory differently.
B.We are becoming more intelligent.
C.We have poorer memories than before.
D.We need a better way to access information.
C
If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars，we would go in darkness happily，the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal(夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead，we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by fillingitwith light.
The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences 一 called light pollution 一 whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design，which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. III-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels 一 and light rhythms — to which many forms of life, including, ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect or life is affected .
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze(霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit nigh, - dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadow on Earth, is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.
We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further form the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing, Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet(磁铁). The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.
Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times righter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint including most other creatures ,we do need darkness .Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.
Living in a glare of our making,we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night .In a very real sense light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy arching overhead.
1.According to the passage, human being .
A.prefer to live in the darkness
B.are used to living in the day light
C.were curious about the midnight world
D.had to stay at home with the light of the moon
2.What does “it”(Paragraph 1) most probably refer to?
A.The night. B.The moon
C.The sky D.The planet
3.The writer mentions birds and frogs to .
A.provide examples of animal protection
B.show how light pollution affects animals
C.compare the living habits of both species
D.explain why the number of certain species has declined
4.It is implied in the last paragraph that .
A.light pollution dose harm to the eyesight of animals
B.light pollution has destroyed some of the world heritages
C.human beings cannot go to the outer space
D.human beings should reflect on their position in the universe
5.What might be the best title for the passage?
A.The Magic light.
B.The Orange Haze.
C.The Disappearing Night.
D.The Rhythms of Nature.
Whether in the home or the workplace, social robots are going to become a lot more common in the next few years. Social robots are about to bring technology to the everyday world in a more humanized way, said Cynthia Breazeal, chief scientist at the robot company Jibo.
While household robots today do the normal housework, social robots will be much more like companions than mere tools. For example, these robots will be able to distinguish when someone is happy or sad. This allows them to respond more appropriately to the user.
The Jibo robot, arranged to ship later this year, is designed to be a personalized assistant. You can talk to the robot, ask it questions, and make requests for it to perform different tasks. The robot doesn’t just deliver general answers to questions; it responds based on what it learns about each individual in the household. It can do things such as reminding an elderly family member to take medicine or taking family photos.
Social robots are not just finding their way into the home. They have potential applications in everything from education to health care and are already finding their way into some of these spaces.
Fellow Robots is one company bringing social robots to the market. The company’s ＂Oshbot＂ robot is built to assist customers in a store, which can help the customers find items and help guide them to the product’s location in the store. It can also speak different languages and make recommendations for different items based on what the customer is shopping for.
The more interaction the robot has with humans, the more it learns. But Oshbot, like other social robots, is not intended to replace workers, but to work alongside other employees. ＂We have technologies to train social robots to do things not for us, but with us,＂ said Breazeal.
1.How are social robots different from household robots?
A. They can control their emotions.
B. They are more like humans.
C. They do the normal housework.
D. They respond to users more slowly.
2.What can a Jibo robot do according to Paragraph 3?
A. Communicate with you and perform operations.
B. Answer your questions and make requests.
C. Take your family pictures and deliver milk.
D. Obey your orders and remind you to take pills.
3.What can Oshbot work as?
A. A language teacher. B. A tour guide.
C. A shop assistant. D. A private nurse.
4.We can learn from the last paragraph that social robots will _______.
A. train employees B. be our workmates
C. improve technologies D. take the place of workers
5.What does the passage mainly present?
A. A new design idea of household robots.
B. Marketing strategies for social robots.
C. Information on household robots.
D. An introduction to social robots.
E
No one is sure how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids near Cairo. But a new study suggests they used a little rock‘n’roll. Long-ago builders could have attached wooden pole s to the stones and rolled then across the sand, the scientists say.
“Technically, I think what they’re proposing is possible,” physicist Daniel Bonn said.
People have long puzzled over how the Egyptians moved such huge rocks. And there’s no obvious answer. On average, each of the two million big stones weighed about as much as a large pickup truck. The Egyptians somehow moved the stone blocks to the pyramid site from about one kilometer away.
The most popular view is that Egyptian workers slid the blocks along smooth paths. Many scientists suspect workers first would have put the blocks on sleds(滑板). Then they would have dragged them along paths. To make the work easier, workers may have__________either with wet clay or with the fat from cattle. Bonn has now tested this idea by building small sleds and dragging heavy objects over sand.
Evidence from the sand supports this idea. Researchers found small amounts of fat, as well as a large amount of stone and the remains of paths.
However, physicist Joseph West thinks there might have been a simpler way , who led the new study . West said , “I was inspired while watching a television program showing how sleds might have helped with pyramid construction . I thought , ‘Why don’t they just try rolling the things?’“A square could be turned into a rough sort of wheel by attaching wooden poles to its sides , he realized . That , he notes , should make a block of stone” a lot easier to roll than a square”.
So he tried____.
He and his students tied some poles to each of four sides of a 30-kilogram stone block. That action turned the block into somewhat a wheel. Then they placed the block on the ground.
They wrapped one end of a rope around the block and pulled. The researchers found they could easily roll the block along different kinds of paths. They calculated that rolling the block required about as much force as moving it along a slippery(滑的)path.
West hasn’t tested his idea on larger blocks, but he thinks rolling has clear advantages over sliding. At least, workers wouldn’t have needed to carry cattle fat or water to smooth the paths.
1.It’s widely believed that the stone blocks were moved to the pyramid site by ______.
A. rolling them on roads
B. pushing them over the sand
C. sliding them on smooth paths
D. dragging them on some poles
2.The underlined part “lubricated the paths” in Paragraph 4 means____.
A. made the path wet
B. made the path hard
C. made the path wide
D. made the path slippery
3.What does the underlined word “it”in Paragraph 7 refer to?
A. Rolling the blocks with poles attached.
B. Rolling the blocks on wooden wheels.
C. Rolling poles to move the blocks.
D. Rolling the blocks with fat.
4.Why is rolling better than sliding according to West ?
A. Because more force is needed for sliding.
B. Because rolling work can be done by fewer cattle.
C. Because sliding on smooth road is more dangerous.
D. Because less preparation on path is needed for rolling.
5.What is the text mainly about ?
A. An experiment on ways of moving blocks to the pyramid site.
B. An application of the method of moving blocks to the pyramid site.
C. An argument about different methods of moving blocks to the pyramid site.
D. An introduction to a possible new way of moving blocks to the pyramid site.
D
Their cheery song brightens many a winter's day. But robins are in danger of wearing themselves out by singing too much. Robins are singing all night一as well as during the day, British-based researchers say.
David Dominoni, of Glasgow University, said that light from street lamps, takeaway signs and homes is affecting the birds' biological clocks, leading to them being wide awake when they should be asleep.
Dr Dominoni, who is putting cameras inside nesting boxes to track sleeping patterns, said lack of sleep could put the birds’ health at risk. His study shows that when robins are exposed to light at night in the lab, it leads to some genes being active at the wrong time of day. And the more birds are exposed to light, the more active they are at night.
He told people at a conference, "There have been a couple of studies suggesting they are increasing their song output at night and during the day they are still singing. Singing is a costly behaviour and it takes energy. So by increasing their song output, there might be some costs of energy."
And it is not just robins that are being kept awake by artificial light. Blackbirds and seagulls are also being morenocturnal. Dr Dominoni said, "In Glasgow where I live, gulls are a serious problem. I have people coming to me saying `You are the bird expert. Can you help us kill these gulls?'.During the breeding(繁殖)season, between April and June, they are very active at night and very noisy and people can't sleep."
Although Dr Dominoni has only studied light pollution, other research concluded that robins living in noisy cities have started to sing at night to make themselves heard over loud noise.
However, some birds thrive(兴旺)in noisy environments. A study from California Polytechnic University found more hummingbirds in areas with heavy industrial machinery. It is thought that they are capitalising on their predators(天敌)fleeing to quieter areas.
1.According to Dr Dominoni's study, what cause robins to sing so much?
A. The breeding season.
B. The light in modern life
C. The dangerous environment.
D. The noise from heavy machinery.
2.What is the researchers' concern over the increase of birds' song output?
A. The environment might be polluted.
B. The birds' health might be damaged.
C. The industry cost might be increased.
D. The people's hearing might be affected.
3.What does the underlined word "nocturnal" in Paragraph 5 mean?
A. Active at night. B. Inactive at night.
C. Active during the day. D. Inactive during the day.
4.Why do some birds thrive in noisy environments?
A. Because there are fewer dangers.
B. Because there is more food to eat.
C. Because there is less light pollution
D. Because there are more places to take shelter.
