Crystal Ear
One day a friend asked my wife Jill if l wanted a hearing aid.“He certainly does.”replied Jill.After hearing about a remarkable new product，Jill finally got up me nerve to ask me if I'd ever thought about getting a hearing aid.“No way.”I said.“It would make me look 20 years older.”“No，no，”she replied.“This is entirely different.It’s Crystal Ear!”Jill was right.Crystal Ear is different—not the old-styled body worn or over—the—ear aid.but an advanced personal sound system so small that it’s like contacts(隱形眼鏡)for your ears.And Crystal Ear is super sensitive and powerful，too.You will hear sounds your ears have been
missing for years.Crystal Ear will make speech louder，and the sound is pure and natural.
I couldn’t believe how tiny it is.It is smaller than the tip of my little finger and it’s almost invisible when worn.There are no wires，no behind—the—ear device.Put it in your ear and its ready.to wear mold(形狀)fits comfortably.Since it’s not too loud or too fight，you may even forget that you’re wearing it! Use it at work or at play.And if your hearing problem is worse in certain situations，use Crystal Ear only when you need it.
Hearing loss，which occurs typically prior to teenage years，progresses throughout one’s life time.Although hearing loss is now the world’s number one health problem，nearly 90 percent of people suffering hearing loss choose to leave the problem untreated.For many millions，treating hearing loss in a conventional way can involve numerous office visits，expensive testing and adjustments to fit your ear.Thanks to Crystal Ear，the“sound solution” is now convenient.Almost 90 percent of people with mild hearing loss，and millions more with just a little hearing drop—off，can be dramatically helped with Crystal
Ear.Moreover，its superior design is energy—efficient，so batteries can last months.Crystal Ear is now available to help these people treat their hearing loss with a small hearing amplifier(放大器).
Initially the writer did not want to buy a hearing aid because______.
A.it would make him look old
B.It would make him nervous
C.it was too expensive
D.it was old—styled
32、 Which of the following is NOT true of Crystal Ear?
A.It is highly sensitive.
B.It is powerful.
C.1t is invisible.
D.It is wireless.
33、 One special feature of Crystal Ear is that______.
A.you can control its volume
B.you needn’t take it off everyday
C.it is solar·powered
D.it saves power
34、 According to the passage，hearing loss is______.
A.only a minor health problem
B.the world’s most common health problem
C.merely a teenage disease
D.an incurable disease
35、 Many people leave their hearing problem untreated，because______.
A.it is not serious
B.Crystal Ear is not yet available
C.it is not easy to have it treated
D.they don't want to look old
36、
根據(jù)下列材料，回答36-50題
A Phone That Knows You're Busy
It's a modem problem: you're too busy to be disturbed by incessant (連續(xù)不斷的) phone calls so you turn your cell phone off.But if you don't remember to turn it back on when you're less busy. You could miss some important calls if only the phone knew when it was wise to interrupt you, you wouldn't have to turn it off at all. Instead, it could let calls through when you are not too busy.
A bunch of behavior sensors (傳感器) and a clever piece of software could do just that, by analyzing your behavior to determine if it's a good time to interrupt you. If built into a phone, the system may decide you're too busy and ask the caller to leave a message or ring back later.
James Fogarty and Scott Hudson at Camegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania based their system oil tiny microphones, cameras and touch sensors that reveal body language and activity. First they had to study different behaviors to find out which ones strongly predict whether your mind is interrupted.
The potential "busyness" signals they focused on included whether the office doors were left open or closed, the time of day, if other people were with the person in question, how close they were to each other, and whether or not the computer was in use.
The sensors monitored these and many other factors while four subjects were at work. At random intervals, the subjects rated how interruptible they were on a scale ranging from "highly interruptible" to "highly not-interruptible". Their ratings were then correlated with the various behaviors . "It is a shotgun (隨意的) approach: we used all the indicators we could think of and then let statistics find out which were important, " says Hudson.
The model showed that using the keyboard, and talking on a landline or to someone else in the office correlated most strongly with how interruptible the subjects judged themselves to be. Interestingly, the computer was actually better than people at predicting when someone was too busy to be interrupted.The computer got it right 82 per cent of the time, humans 77 per cent. Fogarty speculates that this might be because people doing the interrupting are inevitably biased towards delivering their message, whereas computers don't care.
The first application for Hudson and Fogarty's system is likely to be in an instant messaging system, followed by office phones and cellphones. "There is no technological roadblock (障礙) to it being deployed in a couple of years, " says Hudson.
A big problem facing people today is that________.
A.they must tolerate phone disturbances or miss important calls.
B.they must turn off their phones to keep their homes quiet.
C.they have to switch from a desktop phone to a cell phone.
D.they are too busy to make phone calls.
37、 The behavior sensor and software system built in a phone________.
A.could help store messages
B.could send messages instantly
C.could tell when it is wise to interrupt you
D.could identify important phone calls
38、 Scientists at Carnegie Menon University tried to find out________.
A.why office doors were often left open
B.when it was a good time to turn off the computer
C.what questions office workers were bothered with
D.which behaviors could tell whether a person was busy
39、 During the experiment, the subjects were asked________.
A.to control the sensors and the camera
B.to rate the degrees to which they could be interrupted
C.to compare their behaviors with others'
D.to analyze all the indicators of interruption
40、 The computer performed better than people in the study because________.
A.the computer worked harder
B.the computer was not busy
C.people tended to be biased
D.people were not good at statistics
41、
根據(jù)下列材料，回答41-55題
Effects of Environmental Pollution
If pollution continues to increase at the present rate, formation of aerosols (浮質(zhì)) in the atmosphere will cause the onset (開始) of an ice age in about fifty years' time. This conclusion, reached by Dr. S.I. Rasool and Dr. S.H. Schneider of the United States Goddard Space Flight Centre, answers the apparently conflicting questions of whether an increase in the carbon dioxide (二氧化碳) content of the atmosphere will cause the Earth to warm up or increasing the aerosol content will cause it to cool down. The Americans have shown conclusively that the aerosol question is dominant.
Two specters haunting conservationists have been the prospect that environmental pollution might lead to the planet's becoming unbearably hot or cold.One of these ghosts has now been laid.Because it seems that even an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to eight times its present value will produce an increase in temperature of only 2 ℃, which would take place over several thousand years. But the other problem now looms larger than ever.
Aerosols are collections of small liquid or solid particles dispersed in air or some other medium. The particles are all so tiny that each is composed of only a few hundred atoms. Because of this they can float in the air for a very long time. Perhaps the most commonly experienced aerosol is industrial smog (煙霧) of the kind that plagued London in the 1950s and is an even greater problem in Los Angeles today. These collections of aerosols reflect the Sun's heat and thereby cause the Earth to cool.
Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider have calculated the exact effect of a dust aerosol layer just above the Earth's surface in the temperature of the planet. As the layer builds up, the present delicate balance between the amount of heat absorbed from the Sun and the amount radiated from the Earth is disturbed.The aerosol layer not only reflects much of the Sun's light but also transmits the infrared (紅外線的 ) radiation from below. So, while the heat input to the surface drops, the loss of heat remains high until the planet cools to a new balanced state.
Within fifty years, if no steps are taken to stop the spread of aerosols in the atmosphere, a cooling of the Earth by as much as 3.5~C seems inevitable.If that lasts for only a few years it would start another ice age, and because the growing ice caps at each pole would themselves reflect much of the Sun's radiation it would probably continue to develop even if the aerosol layer were destroyed.
The only bright spot in this gloomy forecast lies in the hope expressed by Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider that nuclear power may replace fossil fuels in time to prevent the aerosol content of the atmosphere from becoming critical.
The author's main purpose in writing the article is to warn of________.
A.warm weather
B.hot weather
C.a new ice age
D.a new iceberg
42、 The word "specters" in the second paragraph is closest in meaning to________.
A.pollution.
B.carbon dioxide
C.aerosols
D.ghosts
43、 We learn from the third paragraph that________.
A.London was plagued with rats in the 1950s
B.London is covered with smog today
C.London was polluted by smog in the 1950s
D.Los Angeles is as heavily polluted today as London was in the 1950s
44、 What will happen if the dust aerosol layer develops?
A.The Earth will get extremely hot.
B.The balance between the amount of heat absorbed from the Sun and the amount lost could hardly be maintained.
C.The light of the Sun could no longer reach the surface of the Earth.
D.Infrared radiation could no longer be transmitted from the Earth to outer space.
45、 The only way to stop the spread of aerosols in the atmosphere, according to
Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider, is to use________.
A.fossil fuels
B.electric power
C.nuclear energy
D.coal power
