Even though she’s just 5 years old, Cindy Smart speaks five languages. She’s a good reader. She can tell time and do simple math, including multiplication (乘法) and division. Cindy looks like an average doll, with long, blond hair, baby – blue eyes, and a button nose.

But loaded with some devices, Cindy is the first doll that can see, think, and do as she’s told. The eagle – eyed Cindy follows in the path of other breakthrough toys like Sony’s barking Robot Aibo, which was the first to popularize voice command in the late 1990s. Cindy takes Aibo’s innovations (创新) one step beyond: she not only follows instructions but also recognizes shapes, colors and words, and remembers. The effect is a doll that appears to be learning.

The toy company which produced Cindy Smart spent a decade trying to see how much human nature it could breathe into an inanimate (无生命的) object. Its engineers began creating minibots that sense light, sounds, and pressure. However, without the sense of sight, their toys seemed to be lacking in one of the abilities that life – forms use to react to their environments.

So how do the engineers make a doll actually see? In Cindy’s case, it’s a multistep process. When presented a text like “I love you” and asked “Can you read this?” Cindy identifies it as one of 70 preprogrammed commands. Then the inbuilt digital camera scans a 15 – degree radius (半径) in search of number – or letter – shaped objects. Buried in her stomach, Cindy’s 16 – bit microprocessor compares the text with her database of 700 words. If it’s a match, “I love you,” she says.

1．This passage most likely appears in a         .

      A．medical report      B．classified ad         C．science journal        D．music magazine

2．According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE about Robot Aibo?

       A．It could recognize shapes and colors.

       B．It could respond to spoken commands.

       C．It came onto the market no later than 1990.

       D．It was created much later that Cindy Smart.

3．The underlined “it” in the third paragraph most likely refers to          .

       A．the process          B．the object            C．the doll                D．the company

4．According to the passage, how can Cindy “see”?

      A．She recognizes any text as “I love you”.

       B．She is equipped with a camera to search for text.

       C．She is instructed by an engineer standing next to her.

       D．She makes contact with the shapes of the text with her stomach.

5．What can we infer from this passage?

       A．Cindy can learn exactly like a human.

       B．Cindy has much more human nature than Aibo.

       C．Cindy is the first doll that can see, think, and do as she’s told.

       D．Cindy has no ability to react to her environment.

You know that pearls grow inside oysters(牡蛎), but would you ever think to look for diamonds inside an ostrich(鸵鸟)? Well, a hunter once shot an ostrich and discovered, to his great surprise, that the big bird had swallowed a bunch of diamonds. How could such a strange thing happen?
Like many other birds, the ostrich swallows small stones that stay inside its “gizzard”. The gizzard is a bird’s second stomach. It is where the food is ground up. The small stones help to grind up the food so it can be digested. The small stones do the chewing because birds don’t have teeth. In that case of the ostrich with the diamonds, the bird simply had expensive taste in rocks. It used the diamonds to digest its dinner.
Diamonds and stones aren’t all that an ostrich will swallow. If there are no stones around, it will eat just about anything. Sadly for ostriches in zoos, this can be a fatal habit. The tendency to swallow anything it sees has caused the death of many an ostrich. Cruel or careless people often throw things into the bird’s living space. They throw keys, coins, and even large objects such as horseshoes. The ostrich swallows them without hesitation. Coins can be the worst. Inside the ostrich they wear down to a razor-sharp edge. They will cut open the bird’s gizzard from the inside. When one young zoo ostrich died, 484 coins weighing more than eight pounds were found in its gizzard.
【小题1】
Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?

A．important	B．alive
C．dangerous	D．uncomfortable

You know that pearls grow inside oysters(牡蛎), but would you ever think to look for diamonds inside an ostrich(鸵鸟)? Well, a hunter once shot an ostrich and discovered, to his great surprise, that the big bird had swallowed a bunch of diamonds. How could such a strange thing happen?

  Like many other birds, the ostrich swallows small stones that stay inside its “gizzard”. The gizzard is a bird’s second stomach. It is where the food is ground up. The small stones help to grind up the food so it can be digested. The small stones do the chewing because birds don’t have teeth. In that case of the ostrich with the diamonds, the bird simply had expensive taste in rocks. It used the diamonds to digest its dinner.

  Diamonds and stones aren’t all that an ostrich will swallow. If there are no stones around, it will eat just about anything. Sadly for ostriches in zoos, this can be a fatal habit. The tendency to swallow anything it sees has caused the death of many an ostrich. Cruel or careless people often throw things into the bird’s living space. They throw keys, coins, and even large objects such as horseshoes. The ostrich swallows them without hesitation. Coins can be the worst. Inside the ostrich they wear down to a razor-sharp edge. They will cut open the bird’s gizzard from the inside. When one young zoo ostrich died, 484 coins weighing more than eight pounds were found in its gizzard.

1.

Which of the following best expresses the main idea of the passage?

A. Birds often eat strange and funny things.

B. Ostriches will swallow anything to help them digest food.

C. One ostrich died with 484 coins in its gizzard.

D. Ostriches are often hurt by cruel or careless people.

2.

The ostrich is not smart enough to ______.

  A. digest its own food                                                B. eat only diamonds

  C. avoid eating harmful objects                              D. escape from the zoo

3.

The sentence “the small stones do the chewing” makes rocks seem as though they were ______.

  A. important                                                                 B. alive

  C. dangerous                                                                D. uncomfortable

4.

he word “fatal” in the third paragraph is another word for “______”.

  A. foolish                         B. careless                          C. deadly                    D. cruel

He had his camera ready          he was in the hotel room.

A. in case              B. if only        C. so that                     D. even though