单选题
第二篇 Artificial Intelligence

For years there have been endless articles stating that scientists are on the verge of achieving artificial intelligence and that it is just around the corner. The truth is that it may be just around the corner, but they haven't yet found the right block.
Artificial intelligence aims to build machines that can think. One immediate problem is to define thought, which is harder than you might think. The specialists in the field of artificial intelligence complain, with some justification, that anything that their machines do is dismissed as not being thought. For example, computer now plays very, very good chess.
They can't beat the greatest players in the world, but they can beat just about anybody else. If a human being played chess at this level, he or she would certainly be considered smart. Why not a machine? The answer is that the machine doesn't do anything clever in playing chess. It uses its blinding speed to do a brute force search of all possible moves for several moves ahead, evaluates the outcomes and picks the best. Human don't play chess that way. They see patterns, while computers don't.
This wooden approach to thought characterizes machine intelligence. Computers have no judgment, no common sense. So-called expert systems, one of the hottest areas in artificial intelligence aims to mimic the reasoning processes of human experts in a limited field, such as medical diagnosis or weather forecasting. There may be limited commercial applications for this sort of thing, but there is no way to make a machine that can think about anything under the sun, which a teenager can do.
The hallmark of artificial intelligence to date is that if a problem is severely restricted, a machine can achieve limited success. But when the problem is expanded to a realistic one computers fall flat on their display screens. For example, machines can understand a few words spoken individually by a speaker that they have been trained to hear. They cannot understand continuous speech using an unlimited vocabulary spoken by just any speaker.
单选题 According to the passage, we know that the writer ______.
  • A. thinks that artificial intelligence is just around the corner
  • B. doubts whether scientists can ever find artificial intelligence
  • C. does not believe that scientists have discovered real artificial intelligence
  • D. feels certain that scientists have obtained real artificial intelligence
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】[解析] 根据第一段和第二段，人工智能的目标是制造能够像人一样具有思维的机器，而事实上，目前所说的人工智能与人的思维仍相差甚远。
单选题 Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?
  • A. The author assumes that the specialists' complaints do not hold water.
  • B. Anything that computers do should be seen as thought.
  • C. It is very hard to define thought in the first place.
  • D. Computers can play chess just like humans.
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】[解析] 第二段第二句是本段的主题句。思维是非常难以定义的概念。
单选题 The advantage for computers in chess lies in ______.
  • A. its intelligence in thinking out novel moves
  • B. its ability to make best use of all possible moves rapidly
  • C. its flexibility choosing moves
  • D. its capacity in patterns recognition
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[解析] 根据第二段于计算机下棋能力的分析可知，计算机依赖的是其高速运算的能力来找出最佳走法，而非像人类一样地思考。
单选题 What is particular for machine intelligence?
  • A. Its flawless judgment.
  • B. Its good flexibility.
  • C. Its ability to think broadly.
  • D. Its rigid approach to thought.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[解析] 机器智能的特点是采用一种僵化的方法进行分析。
单选题 Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?
  • A. Computers can beat any person in playing chess.
  • B. Computers can never be employed in weather forecast.
  • C. Computers can be trained to understand some human words.
  • D. Computers can be made to think as a teenager does.
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】[解析] 根据最后一段，机器能理解单独说出的词汇，但无法识别连续的话语。