We all know the hard work that filmmakers and actors put in the film to provide us with entertainment, but it seems that even regular moviegoers like us have a big impact on how a movie turns out too.
For decades, film studios have used so-called test screenings to get feedback from members of the public before a movie comes out.
While test audience members are usually asked to fill in a questionnaire after a screening, telling the film studio what they liked and didn't like, media giant Disney has come up with a more high-tech solution.
According to a paper published this summer by the company's researchers, Disney is measuring the test audience's reactions by using special cameras placed inside cinemas.
Pairing the cameras with custom(定制的) software, the company can track what each audience member is feeling at any point in the movie, from anger to joy.
This works by mapping 68 different points on each audience member's face. The cameras can see in the dark, and the software can figure out a person's mood based on the slightest facial expressions.
It's hoped that this new method will allow more detailed feedback from the test audience. Rather than relying on audience members to recall their feelings after the movie's over,it can accurately read their reactions in real-time.
Test screenings are highly valued in the movie industry, and several well-known movies have been greatly altered(改变)following feedback.
Viewers of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial would have left the cinema feeling a whole lot of difference if it had not been for its test audience's feedback.
"In one cut of the film that was tested,E.T. died instead of going home in his spaceship. You won't be surprised to hear that the test audience in question. didn't warm to this ending at all," wrote media website Den of Geek.
But for those who are concerned about privacy, the cameras won't be installed in public cinemas.
After all, unless you're part of the test audience,being in front of the camera is best left to the movie stars.
【小题1】How do the test audience influence a movie before it comes out?

A．They get involved in the shooting of a movie.

B．They help promote it after test screenings.

C．They give advice on how a movie should end.

D．Their views on the movie may help change it.

【小题2】What is the main advantage the cameras Disney researchers are using have over questionnaires?

A．They protect the audience's privacy better.

B．They allow the audience to recall their feelings more easily.

C．They are able to record the audience's moods accurately on the spot.

D．They can help audience members adjust their moods with custom software.

【小题3】With the example of

A．T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the author intends to ______.

B．illustrate the significance of test screenings

C．emphasize the importance of altering a movie

D．show what kind of endings are better received by viewers

E．explain what kind of feedback could be accepted in test screenings

【小题4】The underlined word "cut"in the third-to-last paragraph probably means ______.

A．a particular version of a movie

B．a part that is removed from a movie

C．a part of something that is shared among people

D．a reduction in the number or amount of something

Several Jobs That Will Be Automated By Artificial Intelligence(AI) And Robots
Translator
Image recognition software and voice recognition software are bringing some major advances to language translation．Applications like Google’s Word Lens can translate words from signs and documents in real time and there are a lot of translation apps that allow you to type in a word or phrase and will translate it for you．
Some will even speak the phrase for you and raw word-to-word translation will be fully automated soon．
Fast food workers
Automated ordering booths have already made their way into a few McDonald’s restaurants around the world，and cooking positions could be removed next．The booths probably can’t handle customer service problems well，so televideo systems could bring in an office employee to deal with complaints．
Field technician
New advances in the Internet of Things could make this work obsolete.
Low-cost sensors combined with high availability cellular／satellite communications and cloud technology are being started to automate and alarm these sites, and can be checked and maintained from a desktop or mobile device.
Sales representative
But, e-commerce is changing how we make purchasing decisions, especially those where there isn’t much differentiation among the major competitors.
If you’re selling a high-differentiation product and／or a high-price, low-volume product you have some job security, but if you’re selling a high-volume, low-differentiation product, you better start polishing your resume, said Doug Camplejohn, CEO of Fliptop. “These kind of product sales are all moving online.”
【小题1】What can Google’s Word Lens do?

A．Translate by image and voice recognition software.

B．Speak the phrase or word for you.

C．Make real-time translation.

D．Allow you to type in a word or phrase.

【小题2】What can we infer from the second part?

A．All the restaurants own automated ordering booths.

B．Service problems can’t be handled automatically.

C．Cooks will not be automated by AI and robots.

D．Customers will have no complaints because of AI．

【小题3】What does the underlined word“obsolete”mean in Part 3?

A．Abandoned.	B．Welcome.
C．Forbidden.	D．Efficient.

【小题4】What does the author mean by“you better start polishing your resume” in the last paragraph?

A．You must value your present work.

B．You have some job security.

C．Your resume needs correcting further.

D．You should consider changing the job.

   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.

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