单选题Smart Window Windows not only let light in to cut down an electricity use for lighting, but the light coming through the window also provides heat. However, windows are not something people typically associate with being a cutting edge technology. Researchers are now working on new technologies that enable a window to quickly change from clear to dark and anywhere in between with a flip of a switch. "It took us a long time to figure out what a window really is," says Claes Granqvist. He's a professor of solid-state physics at Uppsala University in Sweden. "It's contact with the outside world. You have to have visual contact with the surrounding world to feel well. " So, windows and natural light are important for improving the way people feel when they're stuck indoors. Yet, windows are the weak link in a building when it comes to energy and temperature control. In the winter, cold air leaks in. When it's hot and sunny, sunlight streams in. All of this sunlight carries lots of heat and energy. And all of this extra heat forces people to turn on their air conditioners. Producing blasts of cold air, which can feel so refreshing, actually suck up enormous amounts of electricity in buildings around the world. Windows have been a major focus of energy research for a long time. Over the years, scientists have come up with a variety of strategies for coating, glazing, and layering windows to make them more energy efficient. Smart windows go a step further. They use chromogenic technologies which involve changes of color. Electrochromic windows use electricity to change color. For example, a sheet of glass coated with thin layers of chemical compound such as tungsten oxide works a bit like a battery. Tungsten oxide is clear when an electric charge is applied and dark when the charge is removed, that is, when the amount of voltage is decreased, the window darkens until it's completely dark after all electricity is taken away. So applying a voltage determines whether the window looks clear or dark. One important feature that makes a smart window so smart is that it has a sort of "memory. " All it takes is a small jolt of voltage to turn the window from one state to the other. Then, it stays that way. Transitions take anywhere from 10 seconds to a few minutes, depending on the size of the window. The development of smart windows could mean that massive air conditioning systems may no longer need. "In the future," Granqvist says, "our buildings may look different. /

单选题In fine days, you"d better open windows to ventilate the room.

单选题There is certainly some truth to that charge, and our recent Ufinancial/U policies haven' t helped.

单选题The cause of the fire is being investigated.A. looked afterB. looked throughC. looked forward toD. looked into

单选题We were attracted by the {{U}}lure{{/U}} of quick money.

单选题The Appearance of Woman All research to date on body image shows that women are much more critical of their appearance than men—much less likely to admire what they see in the mirror. Up to 8 out of 10 women are dissatisfied with their reflection, and more than half may see a distorted image. Men looking in the mirror are more likely to be either pleased with what they see or indifferent. Research shows that men generally have a much more positive body image than women—if anything, they may tend to over-estimate their attractiveness. Some men looking in the mirror may literally not see the flaws in their appearance. Why are women so much more self-critical than men? Because women are judged on their appearance more than men, and standards of female beauty are considerably higher and more inflexible. Women are continually bombarded with images of the "ideal" face. And constant exposure to idealized images of female beauty on TV, magazines and billboards makes exceptional good looks seem normal and anything short of perfection seem abnormal and ugly. It has been estimated that young women now see more images of outstandingly beautiful women in one day than our mothers saw throughout their entire adolescence. Also, most women are trying to achieve the impossible: standards of female beauty have in fact become progressively more unrealistic during the last century. In 1917, the physically perfect woman was about 5ft 4in tall and weighed nearly 10 stone. Even 25 years ago, top models and beauty queens weighed only 8% less than the average woman, now they weigh 23% less. The current media ideal for women is achievable by less than 5% of the female population—and that"s just in terms of weight and size. If you want the ideal shape, face etc., its probably more like 1%.

单选题The defendant asked for a number of other offences to be taken into account .

单选题The contract between the two companies will expire soon.

单选题It"s all advisable idea to get out of the dispute.

单选题As aquatic plants moved millions of years ago from the ocean to the land, they underwent a number of adaptations .

单选题Artificial Speech Because speech is the most convenient form of communication, in the future we want essentially natural conversations with computers. The primary point of contact will be a simple device that will act as our window into the world. It will have to be small enough to slip into our pocket, so there will be a screen but no keyboard: you will simply talk to it. The device will be permanently connected to the Internet and will keep relevant information up to you as it comes in. Such devices will evolve naturally in the next five to ten years. Just how quickly people will adapt to a voice-based Internet world is uncertain. Many believe that, initially at least, we will need similar conventions for the voice to those we use at present on screen: click, back, forward, and so on. But soon you will undoubtedly be able to interact by voice with all those IT-based services you currently connect with over the Internet by means of a keyboard. This will help the Internet serve the entire population. Changes like this will encompass (围绕，包围) the whole world. Because English is the language of science, it will probably remain the language in which the technology is most advanced, but most speech-recognition techniques are transferable to other languages provided (假如，若是) there is sufficient motivation to undertake the work. Of course, in any language there are still huge problems for us to solve. Carefully dictated, clear speech can now be understood by computers with only a 4～5 percent error rate, but even the most advanced technology still records 30～40 percent errors with spontaneous speech. Within ten years we will have computers that respond to goal-directed conversation, but for a computer to have a conversation that takes into account human social behaviors is probably 50 years off. We are not going to be chatting to the big screen in the living room just yet. In the past, insufficient speed and memory have held us back, but these days they are less of an issue. However, there are those in the IT community who believe that current techniques will eventually hit a brick wall. Personally, I believe that incremental (不断增长的) developments in performance are more likely. But it is true that by about 2040 or so, computer architectures will need to become highly parallel (并行的) if performance is to keep increasing. Perhaps that will inspire some radically new approaches to speech understanding that will replace the methods we are developing now.

单选题She read a poem which {{U}}depicts{{/U}} the splendor of the sunset.

单选题The Northern Lights The sun is stormy and has it own kind of weather. It is so hot and active that even the Sun's gravity cannot hold its atmosphere in check! Energy flows away from the Sun toward the Earth in a stream of electrified particles that move at speeds around a million miles per hour. These particles are called plasma, and the stream of plasma coming from the Sun is called the solar wind. The more active the Sun, the stronger the solar wind. The solar wind constantly streams toward the Earth, but don't worry because a protective magnetic fields surrounds our planet. The same magnetic field that makes your compass point north also steers the particles from the Sun to the north and south poles. The charged particles become trapped in magnetic belts around the Earth. When a large blast of solar wind crashes into the Earth's magnetic field first gets squeezed and then the magnetic field lines break and reconnect. The breaking and reconnecting of the magnetic field lines can cause atomic particles called electrons trapped in the belts to fall into the Earth's atmosphere at the poles. As the electrons fall into the Earth, they collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere, creating flashes of light in the sky. Each atmospheric gas glows a different color. Oxygen and nitrogen glows red and green and nitrogen glows violet-purple. As these various colors glow and dance in the night sky, they create the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights. Watching auroras is fun and exciting, but normally you can only see them in places far north like Alaska and Canada. The movement of the aurora across the sky is usually slow enough to easily follow with your eyes but they can also pulsate, flicker, or even move like waves. During solar maximum, auroras are seen as far south as Florida, even Mexico! Auroras often seem to be very close to the ground, but the lowest aurora is still about 100 kilometers above the ground, a distance much higher than clouds are formed or airplanes can fly. A typical aurora band can be thousands of kilometers long, a few hundred kilometers high, but only a few hundred meters thick. We hope you are able to travel to far-north places like the Arctic Circle and see the Northern Lights at least once during your lifetime. We know you will never forget it!

单选题The father was {{U}}unwilling{{/U}} to give his son the keys to his car.

单选题Only a small minority of the mentally ill are liable to harm themselves or others.

单选题 下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题，每题后面有4个选项。请仔细阅读短文并根据短文回答其后面的问题，从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案。{{B}}第一篇{{/B}} {{B}} Language Learning{{/B}} It is, everyone agrees, a huge task that the child performs when he learns to speak, and the fact that he does so in so short a period of time challenges explanation. Language learning begins with listening. Individual children vary greatly in the amount of listening they do before they start speaking, and late starters are often long listeners. Most children will "obey" spoken instructions some time before they can speak, though the word obey is hardly accurate as a description of the eager and delighted cooperation usually shown by the child. Before they can speak, many children will also ask questions by gesture and by making questioning noises. Any attempt to trace the development from the noises babies make to their first spoken words leads to considerable difficulties. It is agreed that they enjoy making noises, and that during the first few months one or two noises sort themselves out as particularly indicative of delight, distress, sociability, and so on. But since these cannot be said to show the baby's intention to communicate, they can hardly be regarded as early forms of language. It is agreed, too, that from about three months they play with sounds for enjoyment, and that by six months they are able to add new sounds to their repertoire (能发出的全部声音). This self-imitation leads on to deliberate (有意识的) imitation of sounds made or words spoken to them by other people. The problem then arises as to the point at which one can say that these imitations can be considered as speech.

单选题She makes believe to be a princess.A. preventsB. pretendsC. presentsD. prepares

单选题{{B}}第二篇{{/B}} {{B}}Human Ingenuity{{/B}} Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to cope with work that is dangerous, boring, burdensome, or just plain nasty. That compulsion has resulted in robotics—the science of conferring various human capabilities on machines. And if scientists have yet to create the mechanical version of science fiction, they have begun to come Close. As a result, the modern world is increasingly populated by intelligent gizmos whose presence we barely notice but whose universal existence has removed much human labor. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done at automated teller terminals that thank us with mechanical politeness for the transaction. Our subway trains are controlled by tireless robo-drivers. And thanks to the continual miniaturization of electronics and micro-mechanics, there are already robot systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery with submillimeter accuracy—far greater precision that highly skilled physicians can achieve with their hands alone. But if robots are to reach the next stage of laborsaving utility, they will have to operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for themselves—goals that pose a real challenge. “While we know how to tell a robot to handle a specific error,” says Dave Lavery, manager of a robotics program at NASA, “we can’t yet give a robot enough ‘common sense’ to reliably interact with a dynamic world.” Indeed the quest for true artificial intelligence has produced very mixed results. Despite a spell of initial optimism in the 1960s and 1970s when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors might be able to copy the action of the human brain by the year 2010, researchers lately have begun to extend that forecast by decades if not centuries. What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly one hundred billion nerve cells are much more talented—and human perception far more complicated—than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognize the error of a ma chine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and immediately disregard the 98 percent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the monkey at the side of winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a big crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t know quite how we do it.

单选题They only have a limited amount of time to get their points across.

单选题Thousands of people Uperished/U in the storm.