题目内容
The digital dictionary I had______the other day cost me a lot.
- A.repaired
- B.repairing
- C.to repair
- D.to be repaired
考查非谓语动词。考查过去分词作宾补,have sth. done。I had the other day作定,选A。
The system has been designed to give students quick and easy________to the digital resources of the library.
A.access | B.passage | C.way | D.approach |
IMAGINE if there was a device that could do everything for you – wake you up every morning, chat with you and type your e-mails.
The piece of technology in question would be smart, able to tell you about the weather and where the nearest restaurants are.
The good thing is you no longer need to wonder, because something like this already exists. And its name is Siri.
Siri is a voice recognition application designed for Apple products and the concept has been around for almost a year.
When Siri first came out it could only speak English, but now it has “learned” lots of new languages, including Chinese, Cantonese and Taiwanese, reported The Wall Street Journal. So, you can give it orders in your mother tongue.
But how could a cell phone or a computer “hear” what you are saying and understand it? This is all because of voice recognition technology.
When you speak, your voice creates vibrations (振动) in the air – a bit like waves in the water when you throw a rock into the lake. The microphone receives the vibrations and the computer changes them into digital data that is then divided into many parts. They are analyzed one by one to see what pronunciations each part stands for. The computer then puts these pronunciations together into possible words according to its built-in dictionary.
But figuring out the words is far from enough; building words into meaningful sentences is the most difficult part. The computer has to compare what it hears to a large library of known phrases and sentences to determine what the user is saying.
However, people don’t always talk in the most standard way and sometimes make grammatical mistakes. This is why traditional voice recognition software always requires you to remember keywords and to speak in a certain way.
Fortunately, Siri isn’t like that. It’s not just “voice recognition”; it’s “natural language understanding (NLU)”. You can ask it things like “Do I need an umbrella today?” and it will know that you are asking about the weather, according to ABC News.
“The key thing is NLU – understanding what you mean and what you want,” Neil Grant from Nuance, a software company in the US, told The Guardian. “Historically, you had to learn a huge long list of commands . As NLU progresses, you can say what you want in a way that’s natural to you.”
【小题1】What is the function of the first two paragraphs?
A.To show that invention usually results from need. |
B.To clear doubts about voice recognition technology. |
C.To introduce something that offers these helpful services. |
D.To show how the voice recognition works. |
A.Changing the received vibrations into digital data. |
B.Analyzing the digital data to see what pronunciations it represents. |
C.Putting the pronunciations together into possible words. |
D.Figuring out meaningful sentences based on the words. |
A.You can speak in a natural way as you would to a person. |
B.You can only speak English and Chinese. |
C.You have to say things in a certain way. |
D.You have to remember keywords and speak specific commands. |
A.Siri can record and save what you say frequently into a computer dictionary. |
B.Siri will fail to understand what you say if you make grammatical mistakes. |
C.The biggest advantage of Siri is that it’s NLU is rather than just voice recognition. |
D.Since first applied to Apple products a year ago, Siri has made great improvements. |
A.the convenience of future life. |
B.an introduction to the Apple products. |
C.the working system of voice recognition |
D.the introduction to Siri |
Back those photos up
The images were striking. Homes on the East Coast were washed away by Superstorm Sandy. People were in tears, picking up faded photographs, among their only remaining possessions.
If that doesn’t move you to get serious about safekeeping your lifetime of memories, what will? The digital age offers tools never imaginable before—including one-click access to a lifetime of family photos.
Here is a brochure on how to back up (存) your photos and save them online, where they can live forever and be accessible in good times and bad.
Scanning
The first step for those old photos is to scan them and save them to a digital format. Most printers come with scanners these days, so that’s an easy but extremely time-consuming step.
Storing the photos
With your scans in place, import the photos into your computer, and back them up.
You could make multiple copies of the disks and spread them to loved ones. Or you could choose external(外接的) hard drives or USB thumb drive, and add your photo and video collection from your computer.
Online backup
If you need lots of space, look at a pure online backup service, Caronite.
Caronite backs up 300 million files daily. Once you sign up, it starts to pick up everything you have on your hard drive. But photo collection on your computer’s main hard drive charges for $59 a year.
Cloud Storage
For folks who don’t need automatic backup, but instead want to take a more active approach, Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive let you store files online by yourself, share and instantly access them. All offer free options—2GB of free storage for Dropbox, 5GB for Google and 7GB for SkyDrive. But if you want more, you need to pay.
Bottom Line
The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and easiest. But drives can fail. Online services are more expensive, but more secure. With more of us switching back and forth between our computers, such services are the best way to get access to our data from wherever we are.
【小题1】Why does the author mention Superstorm Sandy?
A.To tell the background of the scanning photos. |
B.To attract the readers’ interest in the backups. |
C.describe a severe natural disaster. |
D.To win the readers’ sympathy. |
A.Scanning photos takes little time but costs a lot. |
B.Caronite charges for backing up photos from hard drive. |
C.Google Drive offers unlimited free photo storage on line. |
D.The hard drive or flash drive is the cheapest and safest. |
A.Caronite. | B.Dropbox. | C.SkyDrive. | D.Flash drive. |
A.tell real stories about storage services |
B.introduce some of the storage services |
C.describe the functions of storage services |
D.argue about the advantage of storage services |
MySpace, the social networking website, is different from other websites which only provide stories about other people. MySpace is a place that allows you to broadcast your own stories and personal information to as many people as you like. Started two years ago, it is a big source of information for and about American kids.
Teenagers and their parents feel very differently about it. Teens are rushing to join the site, not sharing their parents' worries. It signals yet another generation gap in the digital era.(数字时代)
For teenagers, it is reliable network to keep in touch with their friends. They will often list their surnames, birthdays, afterschool jobs, school clubs, hobbies and other personal information.
“MySpace is an easy way to reach just about everyone. I don't have all the phone numbers of all my acquaintances (熟人). But if I want to get in touch with one of them, I could just leave them a message on MySpace.” said Abby Van Wassen. She is a sixteen year old student at Woodland Hills High of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Parents on the other hand are seriously concerned about the security problems of MySpace.
“Every time we hold a parents meeting, the first question is always about MySpace,” said Kent Gates, who travels the country doing Internet safety seminars (研讨会).The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has received at least 288 MySpace related complaints, according to Mary Beth Buchanan, a lawyer in Pittsburgh.
“Your profile on MySpace shows all your personal information to anyone on the Web. And MySpace even lists this information by birthplace and age. It's like a free checklist(清单)for troublemakers and it endangers children,” Buchanan said.
【小题1】From the passage we can learn that MySpace ________.
A.brings about the generation gap |
B.is very careful about people's privacy |
C.encourages you to list your personal information |
D.lists the telephone numbers of your friends |
A.Because MySpace has a bad influence on their children. |
B.Because they don't want to pay so much money for MySpace. |
C.Because it takes up too much of their children's spare time. |
D.Because troublemakers can easily approach their children through the site. |
A.negative | B.positive | C.optimistic | D.objective |
A.Internet safety | B.MySpace | C.Generation gap | D.The digital era |