1、雅思（阅读）模拟试卷 94及答案与解析 一、 Reading Module (60 minutes) 0 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. Walking with dinosaurs Peter L Falkingham and his colleagues at Manchester University are developing techniques which look set to revolutionise our un
2、derstanding of how dinosaurs and other extinct animals behaved. The media image of palaeontologists who study prehistoric life is often of field workers camped in the desert in the hot sun, carefully picking away at the rock surrounding a large dinosaur bone. But Peter Falkingham has done little of
3、that for a while now. Instead, he devotes himself to his computer. Not because he has become inundated with paperwork, but because he is a new kind of palaeontologist: a computational palaeontologist. What few people may consider is that uncovering a skeleton, or discovering a new species, is where
4、the research begins, not where it ends. What we really want to understand is how the extinct animals and plants behaved in their natural habitats. Drs Bill Sellers and Phil Manning from the University of Manchester use agenetic algorithm-a kind of computer code that can change itself and evolve - to
5、 explore how extinct animals like dinosaurs, and our own early ancestors, walked and stalked. The fossilised bones of a complete dinosaur skeleton can tell scientists a lot about the animal, but they do not make up the complete picture and the computer can try to fill the gap.The computer model is g
6、iven a digitised skeleton, and the locations of known muscles.The model then randomly activates the muscles.This, perhaps unsurprisingly, results almost without fail in the animal falling on its face. So the computer alters the activation pattern and tries again. usually to similar effect.The modell
7、ed dinosaurs quickly evolve. If there is any improvement, the computer discards the old pattern and adopts the new one as the base for alteration. Eventually, the muscle activation pattern evolves a stable way of moving, the best possible solution is reached, and the dinosaur can walk, run, chase or
8、 graze. Assuming natural selection evolves the best possible solution too, the modelled animal should be moving in a manner similar to its now-extinct counterpart. And indeed, using the same method for living animals(humans, emu and ostriches)similar top speeds were achieved on the computer as in re
9、ality. By comparing their cyberspace results with real measurements of living species, the Manchester team of palaeontologists can be confident in the results computed showing how extinct prehistoric animals such as dinosaurs moved. The Manchester University team have used the computer simulations t
10、o produce a model of a giant meat-eating dinosaur. It is called an acrocanthosaurus which literally meanshigh spined lizardbecause of the spines which run along its backbone. It is not really known why they are there but scientists have speculated they could have supported a hump that stored fat and
11、 water reserves.There are also those who believe that the spines acted as a support for a sail. Of these, one half think it was used as a display and could be flushed with blood and the other half think it was used as a temperature-regulating device. It may have been a mixture of the two.The skull s
12、eems out of proportion with its thick, heavy body because it is so narrow and the jaws are delicate and fine. The feet are also worthy of note as they look surprisingly small in contrast to the animal as a whole. It has a deep broad tail and powerful leg muscles to aid locomotion. It walked on its b
13、ack legs and its front legs were much shorter with powerful claws. Falkingham himself is investigating fossilised tracks, or footprints, using computer simulations to help analyse how extinct animals moved. Modern-day trackers who study the habitats of wild animals can tell you what animal made a tr
14、ack, whether that animal was walking or running, sometimes even the sex of the animal. But a fossil track poses a more considerable challenge to interpret in the same way. A crucial consideration is knowing what the environment including the mud, or sediment, upon which the animal walked was like mi
15、llions of years ago when the track was made. Experiments can answer these questions but the number of variables is staggering.To physically recreate each scenario with a box of mud is extremely time-consuming and difficult to repeat accurately.This is where computer simulation comes in. Falkingham u
16、ses computational techniques to model a volume of mud and control the moisture content, consistency, and other conditions to simulate the mud of prehistoric times. A footprint is then made in the digital mud by a virtual foot. This footprint can be chopped up and viewed from any angle and stress val
17、ues can be extracted and calculated from inside it. By running hundreds of these simulations simultaneously on supercomputers, Falkingham can start to understand what types of footprint would be expected if an animal moved in a certain way over a given kind of ground. Looking at the variation in the
18、 virtual tracks, researchers can make sense of fossil tracks with greater confidence. The application of computational techniques in palaeontology is becoming more prevalent every year. As computer power continues to increase, the range of problems that can be tackled and questions that can be answe
19、red will only expand. Questions 1-6 Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1? In boxes 1-6 on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on
20、 this 1 In his study of prehistoric life, Peter Falkingham rarely spends time on outdoor research these days. （ A） TRUE （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 2 Several attempts are usually needed before the computer model of a dinosaur used by Sellers and Manning manages to stay upright. （ A） TRUE （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIV
21、EN 3 When the Sellers and Manning computer model was used for people, it showed them moving faster than they are physically able to. （ A） TRUE （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 4 Some palaeontologists have expressed reservations about the conclusions reached by the Manchester team concerning the movement of dino
22、saurs. （ A） TRUE （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 5 An experienced tracker can analyse fossil footprints as easily as those made by live animals. （ A） TRUE （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 6 Research carried out into the composition of prehistoric mud has been found to be inaccurate. （ A） TRUE （ B）假 （ C） NOT GIVEN 6 Label
23、the diagram below.Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.Write your answers in boxes 7-9 on your answer sheet.A model of an acrocanthosaurusDinosaurs name comes from spines. One theory: they were necessaryto hold up a【 R7】 _whichhelped control body heat.Skull is【 R8】 _compared
24、 with rest of body.【 R9】 _madeeasier by wide tail and highly developed muscles in legs. 7 【 R7】 8 【 R8】 9 【 R9】 9 Complete the flow-chart below.Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS for each answer. 13 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.The robots
25、 are coming - or are they? What is the current state of play in Artificial Intelligence?A Can robots advance so far that they become the ultimate threat to our existence? Some scientists say no, and dismiss the very idea of Artificial Intelligence. The human brain, they argue, is the most complicate
26、d system ever created, and any machine designed to reproduce human thought is bound to fail. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University and others believe that machines are physically incapable of human thought. Colin McGinn of Rutgers University backs this up when he says that Artificial Intellig
27、ence is like sheep trying to do complicated psychoanalysis. They just dont have the conceptual equipment they need in their limited brains.B Artificial Intelligence, or Al, is different from most technologies in that scientists still understand very little about how intelligence works. Physicists ha
28、ve a good understanding of Newtonian mechanics and the quantum theory of atoms and molecules, whereas the basic laws of intelligence remain a mystery. But a sizeable number of mathematicians and computer scientists, who are specialists in the area, are optimistic about the possibilities. To them it
29、is only a matter of time before a thinking machine walks out of the laboratory. Over the years, various problems have impeded all efforts to create robots. To attack these difficulties, researchers tried to use the top-down approach, using a computer in an attempt to program all the essential rules
30、onto a single disc. By inserting this into a machine, it would then become self-aware and attain human-like intelligence.C In the 1950s and 1960s great progress was made, but the shortcomings of these prototype robots soon became clear. They were huge and took hours to navigate across a room. Meanwh
31、ile, a fruit fly, with a brain containing only a fraction of the computing power, can effortlessly navigate in three dimensions. Our brains, like the fruit flys, unconsciously recognise what we see by performing countless calculations. This unconscious awareness of patterns is exactly what computers
32、 are missing. The second problem is robots lack of common sense. Humans know that water is wet and that mothers are older than their daughters. But there is no mathematics that can express these truths. Children learn the intuitive laws of biology and physics by interacting with the real world. Robo
33、ts know only what has been programmed into them.D Because of the limitations of the top-down approach to Artificial Intelligence, attempts have been made to use a bottom-up approach instead - that is, to try to imitate evolution and the way a baby learns. Rodney Brooks was the director of MITs Artif
34、icial Intelligence laboratory, famous for its lumbering top-down walking robots. He changed the course of research when he explored the unorthodox idea of tiny insectoid robots that learned to walk by bumping into things instead of computing mathematically the precise position of their feet. Today m
35、any of the descendants of Brooks insectoid robots are on Mars gathering data for NASA(The National Aeronautics and Space Administration), running across the dusty landscape of the planet. For all their successes in mimicking the behaviour of insects, however, robots using neural networks have perfor
36、med miserably when their programmers have tried to duplicate in them the behaviour of higher organisms such as mammals. MITs Marvin Minsky summarises the problems of Al: The history of Al is sort of funny because the first real accomplishments were beautiful things, like a machine that could do well
37、 in a maths course. But then we started to try to make machines that could answer questions about simple childrens stories. Theres no machine today that can do that.E There are people who believe that eventually there will be a combination between the top-down and bottom-up, which may provide the ke
38、y to Artificial Intelligence. As adults, we blend the two approaches. It has been suggested that our emotions represent the quality that most distinguishes us as human, that it is impossible for machines ever to have emotions. Computer expert Hans Moravec thinks that in the future robots will be pro
39、grammed with emotions such as fear to protect themselves so that they can signal to humans when their batteries are running low, for example. Emotions are vital in decision-making. People who have suffered a certain kind of brain injury lose the ability to experience emotions and become unable to ma
40、ke decisions. Without emotions to guide them, they debate endlessly over their options. Moravec points out that as robots become more intelligent and are able to make choices, they could likewise become paralysed with indecision. To aid them, robots of the future might need to have emotions hardwire
41、d into their brains.F There is no universal consensus as to whether machines can be conscious, or even, in human terms, what consciousness means. Minsky suggests the thinking process in our brain is not localised but spread out, with different centres competing with one another at any given time. Co
42、nsciousness may then be viewed as a sequence of thoughts and images issuing from these different, smaller minds, each one competing for our attention. Robots might eventually attain a silicon consciousness. Robots, in fact, might one day embody an architecture for thinking and processing information
43、 that is different from ours - but also indistinguishable. If that happens, the question of whether they really understand becomes largely irrelevant. A robot that has perfect mastery of syntax, for all practical purposes, understands what is being said.Questions 14-20Reading Passage 2 has six parag
44、raphs, A-F.Which paragraph contains the following information?Write the correct letter, A-F, in boxes 14-20 on your answer sheet NB You may use any letter more than once. 14 an insect that proves the superiority of natural intelligence over Artificial Intelligence 15 robots being able to benefit fro
45、m their mistakes 16 many researchers not being put off believing that Artificial Intelligence will eventually be developed 17 an innovative approach that is having limited success 18 the possibility of creating Artificial Intelligence being doubted by some academics 19 no generally accepted agreemen
46、t of what our brains do 20 robots not being able to extend their intelligence in the same way as humans 20 Look at the following people(Questions 21-23)and the list of statements below. Match each person with the correct statement, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes 21-23 on your answer sh
47、eet. A Artificial Intelligence may require something equivalent to feelings in order to succeed. B Different kinds of people use different parts of the brain. C Tests involving fiction have defeated Artificial Intelligence so far. D People have intellectual capacities which do not exist in computers
48、. E People have no reason to be frightened of robots. 21 Colin McGinn 22 Marvin Minsky 23 Hans Moravec 23 Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 24-26 on your answer sheet. When will we have a thinking machine? Despite some adva
49、nces, the early robots had certain weaknesses. They were given the information they needed on a【 R24】 _This was known as the top-down approach and enabled them to do certain tasks but they were unable to recognise【 R25】_Nor did they have any intuition or ability to make decisions based on experience. Rodney Brooks tried a different approach. Robots similar to those invented by Brooks are to be found on【 R26】 _where they are collecting information. 24 【 R24】 25 【 R25】 26 【 R26】 26 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions
