资格英语-雅思阅读十大领域之科技篇

1、雅思阅读十大领域之科技篇Part English-Chinese Translation1、 geopolitical event2、 geographical chart3、 commercial pressures4、 logical analysis5、 cope with6、 linguistic structure7、 leave behind8、 short-cut9、 traffic congestion10、 in comparison with.11、 reaction time12、 a forthcoming issue13、 automobile accidentsPa

2、rt Matchinga. boundaryb. concerningc. terraind. violencee. illustrate14、depict15、 landscape16、 tremendous force17、 frontier18、 as toa. each yearb. jamc. importantd. carry oute. response19、 fatal20、 annually21、 congestion22、 reaction23、 implementPart essay question24、 Read Paragraph A and try to find

3、 the event happened about Google maps.25、 Read Paragraph B and try to find whether the event in Paragraph A leads to the unpopularity of commercial maps.26、 Read Paragraph D and try to find the negative effects web-based cartography produced.27、 Read Paragraph M and try to find the reason why some p

4、eople say that commercial maps are equally important as their official counterparts.28、 What is the meaning of 'grand challenges' in Paragraph B?29、 What are the problems for computer mentioned in paragraphs E and F?30、 What is the result of the competition between computers and humans accor

5、ding to Oren Etzioni?31、 What do you think is the main idea of this passage when you see the title?32、 What do you think when you see the figures in Paragraph B?33、 What are the problems Sheldon Jacobson have during the research?Part Actual Test    You should spend about 20 minutes on Ques

6、tions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.You Are Here: How Digital Maps Are Changing the Landscape of the 21st Century    A  Buried beneath November's headlines depicting rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, European economic woes, and the disclosure of confiden

7、tial State Department cables, a meaningful geopolitical event went largely overlooked: Nicaragua invaded Costa Rica. There was no shooting war and the incident involved only a small swath of disputed territory along the San Juan River, part of which divides the two nations. But a Nicaraguan commande

8、r added an interesting wrinkle to the narrative when he dragged an unlikely culprit into the dispute: Google. The commander cited Google Maps, which had erroneously depicted a stretch of the border in Nicaragua's favour by as much as 1.7 miles. Google quickly moved to amend the faulty border dat

9、a and sportingly apologised.    B  The incident raises some interesting issues concerning the future of mapmaking that, thus far, our brave new digital world hasn't yet been forced to confront. Whereas cartographyparticularly the act (or the art) of drawing political lines on geog

10、raphical chartsused to be the purview of nations and international bodies, commercial entities like Google, Bing, Mapquest, and other digital services are the principal mapmakers of the 21st century.    C  Orbiting GeoEye satellites and camera-equipped Google sedans are the Magellans

11、of the digital age, dispatched to explore and catalogueand most importantly make publicunprecedented amounts of geographical data via the Web. If anyone wants to locate anythingbe it a coffee house, a post office, or an international boundary users log into Google or Bing, not the U.N. or the U.S. G

12、eological Survey (USGS). But these commercial maps are compiled from a variety of sources and often blend government-derived mapping data with user-generated content. As such, they are subject to conflicting information, differences of political opinion andas the Nicaraguan incident showsoutright er

13、ror.    D  'With a lot of these web-based tools, the need for formal training in cartography is going away, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing,' says Dr. Brian Tomaszewski, an assistant professor in the Department of Information Sciences & Technologies at the

14、 Rochester Institute of Technology. It's good because it creates rich, centralised data compilations that users constantly update. But before that can happen, someone like Google has to build the underlying map, and there's no single source or authority for global map data to draw from. That

15、 leaves companies in the unenviable position of trying to pick and choose the best data and massage it to fit a single geographical template.    E  In the case of Nicaragua, it turns out that data was simply incorrect. A post on Google's 'Lat Long Blog' explained the error

16、: 'Yesterday we became aware of a dispute that referenced the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua as depicted on Google Maps. This morning, after a discussion with the data supplier for this particular border (the U.S. Department of State), we determined that there was indeed an error in the

17、 compilation of the source data, by up to 2.7 kilometres.'    F  Viewed on Google Maps, however, an incorrect border looks like any other border, and if the U.S. State Department (and, more importantly, Google) says the border is in one place, who is Costa Rica to say it's not

18、? In strict cartographic sense, the treaty that originally established the border is the final word. But no one locates a border by reading a 150-year-old treaty; people find borders by looking at maps, and in the 21st century people consult maps by opening their Web browsers.    G  &

19、#39;We look at the computer and say "how can it be wrong, it's on the computer",' says Dr. Frank Galgano, professor and chairman of Villanova University's Geography and the Environment Department. It's to the computer that the world increasingly turns to find just about eve

20、rything, lending digital mapmakers incredible power to shape users' geospatial perceptions.    H  What's largely missing is the healthy skepticism that users apply to other piecemeal compendia of information like Wikipedia, Galgano says. Google knows its maps contain errors; i

21、t says so in the user agreement (you read that closely, didn't you?). For those people searching for the nearest Starbucks in Manhattan these errors are largely negligible. But for an American hiking near the Iranian border, they can lead to miscalculations with serious consequences.   

22、0;I  'People are forgetting to use common sense and critical thinking,' Tomaszewski says. 'Google Maps isn't an official mapping agency like a government. They buy or acquire data and then assemble it into a map. It's almost frightening to think that militaries or government

23、s might rely on Google as the final word on boundaries or borders between nations.'    J  But there are a variety of reasons why a government or military might do so, not least of which is the lack of anything better. In the United States, the USGS maintains an extensive collectio

24、n of publicly available map data accurate down to about 130 feet. Many other nations treat their official maps as state secrets. Still others don't have the resources to produce accurate maps at all. That makes commercial, publicly available maps like Google's very attractive, if not any mor

25、e authoritative.    K  Why Nicaragua chose to use a Google Map to justify military actions along a tense border is something for the geopolicy wonks to debate. Regardless, the incident embodies the changing nature and impact of cartography in a rapidly digitising environment. After al

26、l, borders are nothing more than imaginary lines enforced by mutual agreement. Cartography is inexact enough already, and the blurring line between 'official' cartography and commercial maps rich in content but low in complexity further compounds that lack of concreteness.    L

27、60;That's not to say commercial maps don't carry tremendous value. Their accessibility has revolutionised the way people use maps, particularly as they pertain to commerce. The economic importance of being 'on the map' may not be outwardly apparent, but consider the case of Sunrise,

28、Fla.; the community of 90,000 has inexplicably disappeared from Google Maps three times since August of last year. During these 'blackouts', local businesses reported flattening commerce as new customers couldn't locate them. Online orders ground to a halt for some businesses. After all,

29、 how would anyone find a florist or automotive shop that's not searchable? When Sunrise disappeared from Google Maps, it might as well have disappeared completely.    M  So what makes a real map in the 21st century? Some would argue that the musty old analogue maps tucked into nat

30、ional archives around the world are still the real deal, invested with the authority of governments. But if asked which is more important to their everyday lives, the citizens of Sunrise, Fla., might argue that commercial maps, regardless of inaccuracies or oversimplifications, represent a far great

31、er social and economic utility. To the average person, commercial maps like those compiled by Google, Bing, or Yahoo have become at least as equally important as their 'official' counterparts.34、Reading Passage 1 has thirteen paragraphs, A-M.    Which paragraph contains the followi

32、ng information?    Write the correct letter, A-M, in boxes on your answer sheet.    the description that maps have commercial values35、 the comparison between paper maps and commercial maps36、 the effects the mistaken information on maps has on different people37、 the examples of

33、 organisations who provide map-related information38、 the explanation that Google gives to the Nicaragua affair39、 the idea about the over-dependence on computers40、Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?    In boxes on your answer sheet, write &#

34、160;  TRUE              if the statement agrees with the information    FALSE             if the statement disagrees with the information    FALSE             if there is no inform

35、ation on this    The reason why Nicaragua invaded Costa Rica is that Google provides mistaken information about their territory.41、 Google collects geographical data by GeoEye.42、 More people choose web pages like Google to search out places rather than some official organisations.43、 Web-

36、related tools can only bring about troubles to people.44、 People still say Yes to Google's mistaken data because it is unlikely for them to read the 150- year-old treaty.45、 People depend on computers much more than they can imagine.46、 The popularity of commercial maps is due to the invisibilit

37、y of official maps.The Difference Engine: The Answering Machine    A  It was not quite a foregone conclusion, but all the smart money was on the machine. Since the first rehearsal over a year ago, it had become apparent that Watsona supercomputer built by IBM to decode tricky question

38、s posed in English and answer them correctly within secondswould trounce the smartest of human challengers. And so it did earlier this week, following a three-day contest against the two most successful human champions of all time on 'Jeopardy!', a popular quiz game aired on American televis

39、ion. By the end of the contest, Watson had accumulated over $77,000 in winnings, compared with $24,000 and $21,600 for the two human champions. IBM donated the $1m in special prize money to charity, while the two human contestants gave half their runner-up awards away.    B  IBM has a

40、 long tradition of setting 'grand challenges' for itselfas a way of driving internal research and innovation as well as demonstrating its technical smarts to the outside world. A previous challenge was the chess match staged in 1997 between IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer and the then worl

41、d champion, Garry Kasparov. As shocking as it seemed at the time, a computer capable of beating the best chess-player in the world proved only that the machine had enough computational horsepower to perform the rapid logical analysis needed to cope with the combinatorial explosion of moves and count

42、er-moves. In no way did it demonstrate that Deep Blue was doing something even vaguely intelligent.    C  Even so, defeating a grandmaster at chess was child's play compared with challenging a quiz show famous for offering clues laden with ambiguity, irony, wit and double meaning

43、as well as riddles and punsthings that humans find tricky enough to fathom, let alone answer. Getting a mere number-cruncher to do so had long been thought impossible. The ability to parse the nested structure of language to extract context and meaning, and then use such concepts to create other lin

44、guistic structures, is what human intelligence is supposed to be all about.    D  Four years in the making, Watson is the brainchild of David Ferrucci, head of the DeepQA project at IBM's research centre in Yorktown Heights, New York. Dr. Ferrucci and his team have been using sear

45、ch, semantics and natural-language processing technologies to improve the way computers handle questions and answers in plain English. That is easier said than done. In parsing a question, a computer has to decide what is the verb, the subject, the object, the preposition as well as the object of th

46、e preposition. It must disambiguate words with multiple meanings, by taking into account any context it can recognise. When people talk among themselves, they bring so much contextual awareness to the conversation that answers become obvious. 'The computer struggles with that,' says Dr. Ferr

47、ucci.    E  Another problem for the computer is copying the facility the human brain has to use experiencebased short-cuts (heuristics) to perform tasks. Computers have to do this using lengthy step-by-step procedures (algorithms). According to Dr. Ferrucci, it would take two hours fo

48、r one of the fastest processors to answer a simple natural-language question. To stand any chance of winning, contestants on 'Jeopardy!' have to hit the buzzer with a correct answer within three seconds. For that reason, Watson was endowed with no fewer than 2,880 Power 750 chips spread over

49、 90 servers. Flat out, the machine can perform 80 trillion calculations a second. For comparison's sake, a modern PC can manage around 100 billion calculations a second.    F  For the contest, Watson had to rely entirely on its own resources. That meant no searching the Internet f

50、or answers or asking humans for help. Instead, it used more than 100 different algorithms to parse the natural-language questions and interrogate the 15 trillion bytes of trivia stored in its memory banksequivalent to 200m pages of text. In most cases, Watson could dredge up answers quicker than eit

51、her of its two human rivals. When it was not sure of the answer, the computer simply shut up rather than risk losing the bet. That way, it avoided impulsive behaviour that cost its opponents points.    G  Your correspondent finds it rather encouraging that a machine has beaten the bes

52、t in the business. After all, getting a computer to converse with humans in their own language has been an elusive goal of artificial intelligence for decades. Making it happen says more about human achievement than anything spooky about machine dominance. And should a machine manage the feat withou

53、t the human participants in the conversation realising they are not talking to another person, then the machine would pass the famous test for artificial intelligence devised in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician famous for cracking the Enigma and Lorenz ciphers during the second world war

54、.    H  It is only a matter of time before a computer passes the Turing Test. It will not be Watson, but one of its successors doubtless will. Ray Kurzweil, a serial innovator, engineer and prognosticator, believes it will happen by 2029. He notes that it was only five years after the

55、 massive and hugely expensive Deep Blue beat Mr. Kasparov in 1997 that Deep Fritz was able to achieve the same level of performance by combining the power of just eight personal computers. In part, that was because of the inexorable effects of Moore's Law halving the price/performance of computi

56、ng every 18 months. It was also due to the vast improvements in pattern-recognition software used to make the crucial tree-pruning decisions that determine successful moves and countermoves in chess.    I  Now that the price/performance of computers has accelerated to a halving every

57、12 months, Mr. Kurzweil expects a single server to do the job of Watson's 90 servers within seven yearsand by a PC within a decade. If cloud computing fulfils its promise, then bursts of Watson-like performance could be available to the public at nominal cost even sooner. Mr. Kurzweil believes t

58、hat once computers master human levels of pattern recognition and language understanding, they will leave mankind way behind. By then, they will have combined the human skills of language and pattern recognition with their own unique ability to master vast corpora of knowledge.    J  

59、Will that mean game over for humanswith robots keeping people around merely as pets? 'Absolutely not', says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Centre at the University of Washington in Seattle. But it does mean, he notes, that computers will be able to achieve vastly more than they can tod

60、ay. For a start, super-smart machines capable of answering questions in English (or any other natural language) will change search engines out of all recognition. No longer will Google and Bing bombard users with hundreds or even thousands of dumb links to dubious sources. Instead, people will get t

61、he unique and meaningful answers they are seeking.47、Reading passage 2 has ten paragraphs, A-J.    Which paragraph contains the following information?    Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.    NB You may use any letter more than once.   &#

62、160;the funded support from competitors in the contest48、 the reasons for the progress of computers49、 the name of a machine that can speak English50、 the positive attitude to the question whether machines can replace human beings51、 the range of technologies that are used to develop the English-speaking