Driverless technology will soon enter another major global industry: shipping. Several companies recently announced plans to launch self-sailing ships to improve safety and efficiency.

One of them is the Norwegian chemical company Yara International. Yara has teamed up with another Norwegian company, Kongsberg, to build an autonomous goods ship expected to be launched next year.

Kongsberg developed the ship's electrical technology and autonomous control systems. The ship is fully electric to reduce air pollution. It is designed to carry goods containers normally transported by truck. This means the ship will also improve road safety by replacing about 40, 000 truck trips a year. The company plans to operate the ships by far-away control beginning sometime next year. By 2020, the ships should be loading and sailing themselves. While Yara's ships will be limited to Norway at first, the company plans to greatly expand its autonomous shipping operations in the coming years.

Another company putting a high priority（优先）to self-sailing ships is the world's largest mining company, Australia's BHP Billiton. The company's Vice President of Freight, Rashpal Bhai, recently spoke about the technology in a website post. Bhatti believes automation will be one of the biggest changes for shipping in the future. He said, "Autonomous ships offer important opportunities to improve safety and provide more effective results to the supply chain of the sea. "He added that self-sailing ships could become a reality within the next decade.

Rolls-Royce, the British automobile and engine manufacturer（制造商）, is also developing unmanned（无人驾驶的）shipping technologies. Oskar Levander is the company's head of operations at sea. He said in a conference last year, "This is happening. It's not if, it's when. "

Levander said these autonomous ships could be controlled by far-away operators from anywhere. He added, "Because these ships will be designed to be unmanned, they can be built smaller, more efficient and environmentally friendly. "

【小题1】Why have several countries announced plans to produce self-sailing ships？

A．To save money.

B．To develop electrical technology in ships.

C．To compete in autonomous control systems.

D．To make shipping more effective and less risky.

【小题2】What do Oskar Levander's words suggest in Paragraph 4？

A．It is too early to make autonomous ships.

B．The supply chain of the sea will be busier.

C．People are more concerned about autonomous ships.

D．Unmanned shipping technologies are becoming more mature.

【小题3】What would be the best title for the text?

A．Automation in Sail

B．Self-sailing Ships in Use

C．Automation in Some Fields

D．Automation in Imagination

   Nature has its own way of balancing itself out，but when we humans get involved，we tend to throw things out of control. Forests and oceans are natural carbon sinks that absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but since we’ve been pumping too much into the air, those sinks can’t keep up. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Advancement of Science in Germany, led by biologist Tobias Erb，have figured out a way to supercharge plants to make them better at absorbing carbon dioxide, which could be a key defense against climate change.

Erb and his team figured out a way to make plants more efficient（效率高的）at absorbing carbon, so that they consumed more carbon in a shorter amount of time. “If you think about plants, they are efficient carbon dioxide -fixing filters, but they are not fast,” Erb said. “I think there is a chance to improve existing biology with synthetic（人造的）biology.”

Erb’s team identified 17 enzymes（酶）from nine different organisms, re-engineering three of them, which had enlarged carbon consumption. When those enzymes worked together as a team, they worked better at not only plants’ natural enzymes, but also themselves individually.

Existing enzymes in plants consume about 5 to 10 molecules（分子）of carbon dioxide per second. The team of enzymes that Erb used consumed 80 molecules per second.

So far, these enzymes have only been tested in test tubes in the lab, but the next step is real world testing where the enzymes would be introduced into plants to see if the same result occurs. If those tests show that plants really can be supercharged, we will have a new tool in the fight against climate change where not only do we protect the amazing carbon-absorbing forests we have, but we also apply these super plants or an artificial leaf technology using the enzymes into other fields.

【小题1】Why can't forests and oceans balance nature nowadays?

A．Oceans and forests are getting smaller.

B．We human beings give off too much carbon dioxide.

C．A large number of forests are cut down.

D．There are too many creatures in the world.

【小题2】Which is the key defense against climate change according to Erb and his team?

A．To increase the plants' ability and efficiency to absorb carbon dioxide.

B．To make oceans and forests absorb more carbon dioxide quickly.

C．To reduce humans' activities giving off too much carbon dioxide.

D．To increase the number of plants in the world.

【小题3】What can we conclude from the last paragraph?

A．The enzymes have proved useful in the real world.

B．Erb’s team are confident about the technology.

C．The enzymes only work in the lab.

D．The technology may have a bright future.

【小题4】This passage is intended to ____.

A．introduce a possible way to better plants’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide

B．call on people to pay more attention to the balance of nature

C．analyze the cause and result of climate change related to plants

D．explore the possibility of using plants to fight against climate change

   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.

语法填空

China's first manned spaceship lifted off at 9 a. m. on Wednesday, October 15th, 2003 in Jiuquan, Gansu Province. It carried China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, 【小题1】 was a pilot in the army. The launch was 【小题2】（success）. "When the spaceship separated 【小题3】 the rocket, I suddenly got 【小题4】 feeling of soaring into the sky because of the zero gravity, "said Yang Liwei. The Shenzhou V circled the earth 14 times. When the spaceship 【小题5】（do）its seventh circle, Yang showed the flags of China and the United Nations, 【小题6】（express）the wishes of the Chinese people 【小题7】（explore）and use space 【小题8】（peaceful）. Yang landed in Inner Mongolia safely at 6：23 a. m. on October 16th. He told 【小题9】（report）that when Shenzhou V let out its parachute, he felt the ship was shaking. Millions of people all over China were watching TV when the spaceship landed safely. Yang was happy to return home 【小题10】 he thought 21 hours was too short to stay in space.

If you could be anybody in the world, who would it be? Your neighbour or a super star? A few people have experienced what it might be like to step into the skin of another person, thanks to an unusual virtual reality（虚拟现实）device. Rikke Wahl, an actress, model and artist, was one of the participants in a body swapping experiment at the Be Another lab, a project developed by a group of artists based in Barcelona. She swapped with her partner, an actor, using a machine called The Machine to Be Another and temporarily became a man. "As I looked down, I saw my whole body as a man, dressed in my partner's pants," she said. "That's the picture I remember best."
The set-up is relatively simple. Both users wear a virtual reality headset with a camera on the top. The video from each camera is sent to the other person, so what you see is the exact view of your partner. If she moves her arm, you see it. If you move your arm, she sees it.
To get used to seeing another person's body without actually having control of it, participants start by raising their arms and legs very slowly, so that the other can follow along. Eventually, this kind of slow synchronised（同步的）movement becomes comfortable, and participants really start to feel as though they are living in another person's body.
Using such technology promises to alter people's behaviour afterwards-potentially for the better. Studies have shown that virtual reality can be effective in fighting racism-the bias（偏见）that humans have against those who don't look or sound like them. Researchers at the University of Barcelona gave people a questionnaire called the Implicit Association Test, which measures the strength of people's associations between, for instance, black people and adjectives such as good, bad, athletic or awkward. Then they asked them to control the body of a dark skinned digital character using virtual reality glasses, before taking the test again. This time, the participants' bias scores were lower. The idea is that once you've "put yourself in another's shoes" you're less likely to think ill of them, because your brain has internalised the feeling of being that person.
The creators of The Machine to Be Another hope to achieve a similar result. "At the end of body swapping, people feel like holding each other in their arms," says Arthur Pointeau, a programmer with the project. "It's a really nice way to have this kind of experience. I would really, really recommend it to everyone."
【小题1】The word "swapping" (paragraph 1) is closest in meaning to______.

A．building

B．exchanging

C．controlling

D．transplanting

【小题2】We can infer from the experiment at the Be Another lab that______.

A．our feelings are related to our bodily experience

B．we can learn to take control of other people's bodies

C．participants will live more passionately after the experiment

D．The Machine to Be Another can help people change their sexes

【小题3】In the Implicit Association Test, before the participants used virtual reality glasses to control a dark skinned digital character, ______.

A．they fought strongly against racism

B．they scored lower on the test for racism

C．they changed their behaviour dramatically

D．they were more biased against those unlike them

【小题4】It can be concluded from the passage that______.

A．technology helps people realize their dreams

B．our biases could be eliminated through experiments

C．virtual reality helps promote understanding among people

D．our points of view about others need changing constantly