You'll probably never go to Mars or sing on the stage with The Rolling Stones. But if virtual reality （VR）ever lives up to its promise, you might be able to do all these things - and many more - without even leaving your home.Unlike real reality, virtual reality means simulating（模拟）bits of our world. Apart from games and entertainment, it's long been used for training airline pilots and surgeons and for helping scientists to figure out difficult problems such as the structure of protein molecules（蛋白质分子）. Then how does it work?

Close your eyes and think of virtual reality and you probably picture something like this:a man wearing a wrap-around headset and data gloves wired into a powerful workstation or supercomputer. What distinguishes VR from an ordinary computer experiences the nature of the input and output. While an ordinary computer uses things like a keyboard, a mouse, or speech recognition for input, VR uses sensors that detect how your body is moving. A PC displays output on a screen while VR uses two screens （one for each eye） , surround-sound speakers, and maybe some forms of touch and body feedback as well.

VR has been routinely used by scientists,doctors, engineers, architects, archaeologists, and the military for about the last 30 years. Difficult and dangerous jobs are hard to train for. How  can you safely practice taking a trip to space, making a parachute jump, or carrying out brain surgery? All these things are obvious candidates for virtual reality applications.

Like any technology, virtual reality has both good and bad points. Critics always raise the risk that people may be addicted to alternative realities to the point of ignoring their real-world lives, but this criticism has been leveled at everything from radio and TV to computer games and the Internet. Like many technologies, VR takes little or nothing away from the real world: you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

【小题1】According to the passage, virtual reality means ____________ .

A．imagining beautiful things in our mind

B．creating something that doesn't exist

C．creating an environment that seems real

D．cloning something that has died out

【小题2】What equipment do we probably need for virtual reality?

A．A keyboard, a headset and a supercomputer.

B．A headset, data gloves and speech recognition.

C．A headset, data gloves and a supercomputer.

D．A keyboard, a mouse and speech recognition.

【小题3】Paragraph 3 is mainly about ____________ .

A．the principles of virtual reality

B．the applications of virtual reality

C．the history of virtual reality

D．the study team of virtual reality

【小题4】What is the writer's attitude towards VR?

A．Appreciative.	B．Cautious.
C．Skeptical.	D．Indifferent.

   Technological innovation（创新）may not give you a warm feeling. 【小题1】 Messaging apps are examples of technology that is helping bring people together. It’s ready to continue improving our lives as innovation allows technology to really understand how we live.

【小题2】

Some of the most popular and widely adopted innovations make things we’re already doing easier. A well-designed piece of technology can transform something that consumes time into a worry-free touch of your finger, giving you more time to spend with friends and family.

Proving that you really are you

Developers keep finding new and brilliant ways to prove our identities online. With fingerprints and voice recognition, technology keeps getting better at proving we are who we say we are. 【小题3】 .The more trust we have, the easier it will be to fully welcome the aspects of fintech（金融科技）and have control of our financial data.

Helping make good ideas a reality

Crowdfunding（众筹）technology keeps breaking down walls that may have previously kept good ideas from being realized. Here’s how it works: You throw your project to people through an online platform. 【小题4】 . By connecting dreamers and inventors to a new type of capital, technology is giving more creative ideas the opportunity to become a reality.

Adding even more quality to quality time

As technology continues improving, it becomes easier to build and keep a connection with someone who isn’t in the same location as you. 【小题5】 . And think about how great it will be when you can communicate with your friends and relatives in virtual reality. It will be the next best thing to be together in person.

A．Sparing some time to make friends

B．Freeing up more time for friends and family

C．However, when at its best, it opens our eyes to many things

D．Actually, it can do wonders to deepen our interpersonal connections

E．Think about how much easier it is to have a video meeting than before

F．This can make it easier to trust the connections we make online

G．If they are interested in your project, they donate money to fund your project

   There's a good chance that something you've bought online has been in the hands of a " picker". These are the workers in warehouses (仓库) who pick, pack and ship all those things we ordered.

At Amazon and other companies, they're working side by side with robots. Experts say while the robots are replacing some human workers, the machines aren't quite ready to take over completely.

When a robot finds its storage unit,' it slides underneath, lifts it up and then delivers it to a worker they're called pickers. On a recent day, the computer told a picker to grab what looked like a fantasy board （#t 3#)game. The picker found it, packed it and placed it on the conveyer belt.

"In a traditional fulfillment center where the workers would walk to the different items, it can take hours to fulfill a customer order," Robinson says.

Now, with the help of robots, that task takes minutes and fewer humans.

So is this a sign that we're entering a new industrial revolution?

" It's definitely going to take over a lot of jobs ", says Karen Myers, a scientist at SRI, one of Silicon V alley's oldest research centers.

At the same time, she says, " We're running against the limits of technology. " Take the picker at the Amazon fulfillment center for example. Myers says those skills prove to be uniquely human.

"Our fingers are incredibly flexible and the current generation of robotic operators are getting much, much better," she says. "But they're just not quite there yet."

There's also the robot's brain.

Remember that board game the Amazon worker was looking for? She could barely see the box when it was filled into the storage bin——but she could tell it was a board game. Robots can't do that.

Technologists say that, increasingly, humans will work side by side with robots——instead of robots working alone.

Amazon says robots and humans enabled the Tracy warehouse to fulfill customer orders faster. That means more customers and more human workers.

【小题1】What does a picker do according to the text?

A．Selling goods.	B．Storing goods.
C．Delivering goods.	D．Producing goods.

【小题2】With the help. of robots, the tasks involved will become .

A．more difficult	B．less straight
C．more efficient	D．less profitable

【小题3】Compared with robots, which of the following is the advantage of human beings?

A．Flexible.	B．Artificial.
C．Powerful.	D．Energetic.

【小题4】What would be the best title for the text?

A．Robots replacing humans completely

B．Robots and humans working side by side

C．The future of robots .

D．The advantages of shopping online

   New technology rules the whole world now. But I still remember when I was a child, I did not have a cell phone or a computer because it was not necessary at all in those days. The Internet was not popular and the touch screen technology was unknown.

At this time here in the US smartphones are really a need, especially for young and business people. There are many applications (应用软件) really useful like maps, dictionaries, e-mails and games.

For me, I use my smartphone to check the weather and to look for something on the Internet and of course to keep communicating through calls and texts. Besides, I like music applications, GPS and Facebook.

Many tests have discovered that cell phones cause damage to us because they send out radioactive (具有放射性的) waves to our bodies and this could cause cancer.

Psychologists say that these devices can affect behavior and I believe everyone knows it is harmful to the eyes if we are sitting for a long time in front of the computer. However, it seems to be difficult for us to give up, even if we know how bad it is for our health. The use of technology becomes more and more important in our lives.

I think the use of technology has brought us unimaginable things. If we use technology correctly, I am sure it would be possible to decrease the damage to our bodies.

Keep in mind that it is important not to focus only on technology, but to spend time with our families and people close to us.

【小题1】What can we know from the passage?

A．The author is a businessman working for a cell phone company.

B．The author has suffered a lot from the use of electrical devices.

C．The author knows little about the functions of modern cell phones.

D．The author is quite pleased with the various functions of cell phones.

【小题2】Which of the following does the author agree with?

A．It’s not necessary to add more applications to cell phones.

B．Cell phones have made our world a boring place to live in.

C．New technology has done people more harm than good.

D．New technology makes people separated from each other.

【小题3】What does the underlined word “decrease” in Paragraph 6 mean?

A．Keep.	B．Cause.
C．Reduce.	D．Add.

【小题4】What does the author mainly discuss in the passage?

A．The importance of the Internet.	B．The applications of cell phones.
C．The role of new technology in our lives.	D．The health problems brought by cell phones.

A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.
“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.
They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.
While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.
Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”
【小题1】The difficulty the team of engineers met with while making the robotic fly was that __________.

A．they had no model in their mind

B．they did not have sufficient time

C．they had no ready-made components

D．they could not assemble the components

【小题2】It can be inferred from paragraphs 3 and 4 that the robotic fly __________.

A．consists of a flight device and a control system

B．can just fly in limited areas at the present time

C．can collect information from many sources

D．has been put into wide application

【小题3】Which of the following can be learned from the passage?

A．The robotic flyer is designed to learn about insects.

B．Animals are not allowed in biological experiments.

C．There used to be few ways to study how insects fly.

D．Wood’s design can replace animals in some experiments.

【小题4】Which of the following might be the best title of the passage?

A．Father of Robotic Fly

B．Inspiration from Engineering Science

C．Robotic Fly Imitates Real Life Insect

D．Harvard Breaks Through in Insect Study