高二英语阅读理解强化训练附解析Day 277
Passage 1
When I was a boy, my parents and I traveled from New York City to the Pennsylvania countryside for a week-long taste of rural life. We stayed in a guesthou on a farm, joining in the daily routines and eating meals with the farmer and his family. We got up early to e the cows as they were milked. I even tried my hand at milking one, then joined the farmer as he relead the cows into the field afterward.
Decades later I still have vivid memories of that trip, which made me realize the value of a vacation, of eing new things, meeting new people and sharing memorable experiences with family members. To this day, I still consider that family trip when I plan my approach to planning and taking time off with my wife and kids. Vacations are a time for resting and connecting. As a bank manager, I spend much of my workday encouraging my customers to save their money. One of the reasons I give is that we should all have enough money for a family vacation every year. In our busy lives, family is what we should be saving our mone
y and time for.
For my family, our vacation starts when we begin planning the trip. We talk about destinations and our budgets ahead of time. Involving the kids in planning the vacation makes sure that they have a great vacation too. While I prefer to visit historical sites and muums, they love to fish and swim. So I build in some relaxation time for us all so that the vacation works for everyone.
Each year, tting aside vacation time to spend together is especially important to us. A relaxing environment opens the doors to all kinds of conversations - deep, silly or meaningful. There’s no pressure from the usual everyday tasks.
What matters is that everyone is having a great time.
1. Why did the author go to the countryside when he was a boy?
A. To milk the cow. B. To meet his parents.
C. To experience country life. D. To enjoy the scenery.
2. Which of the following is NOT true according to Paragraph 2?
A. The author learned to milk and fish.
B. The author understood the value of vacations.
C. The author met new people and learned things during the trip.
D. The trip helped the author understand the significance of vacations better.
3. What is the passage mainly about?
A. The author had a good time in the countryside.
B. The author tried to let family members enjoy the holidays.
C. The author advid others to spend vacations with their families.
D. The author realized the value of family vacations and put it into practice.
Passage 2
US poet Allen Ginsberg once said, “Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind.”
To recognize the unique ability of poetry to capture the human spirit, World Poetry Day is held by the United Nations on March 21 each year.
The magic of poetry lies in the connection built up through words between the author and the reader. When we read a poem, we often imagine what the poet was thinking when he wrote it, or what he was doing at the time. The thoughts let us connect with the words better, as if we’d written the poem ourlves.
But in the age of artificial intelligence, would a poem still mean as much if it weren’t written by a human at all? Today computers can create all kinds of texts, including rearch papers, books, news stories and even poems by using algorithms (算法).
In 2013, Australian rearcher Oscar Schwartz and his friend Benjamin Laird created a website called “bot or not”, where readers can read poems and guess whether they were
written by a human or a computer. During a recent speech at TedX Sydney, Schwartz said that throughout the years, some of the website’s poems were able to fool 65 percent of human readers into thinking they were written by a human.
By launching the website, Schwartz and Laird hoped that people would question the difference between humans and machines - and be able to identify what makes us human.
Unstableness is part of the answer. “The human mind is not a cold, hard fact,” Schwartz said during his TedX Sydney speech. “Rather, it is something that’s constructed with our opinions and something that changes over time.”
A computer may be able to create poems that are correct in both grammar and style, but it wouldn’t be able to get the same meanings and emotions across as a human poet could. In fact, current AI software creates poems bad on ones that have already been written by humans. As Schwartz noted, “The computer works like a mirror that reflects any idea of a human that developers teach it.”
So a new challenge aris: What kind of human mind do we want the computer to reflect back at us?
