Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passages coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
The problem of robocalls has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don’t know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams (欺诈). We are finally waking up to the severity of the problem 【小题1】 supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, it’s too little, too late. By the time these “solutions” become widely available, scammers will have moved onto cleverer means. In the near future, it’s not just going to be the number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you 【小题2】 (hear) is actually real.
That’s 【小题3】 there are a number of powerful voice manipulation and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year’s I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a convincing human-【小题4】 (sound) voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book as reservation without detection.
These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason that robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than precision. A decade of data breaches (数据侵入) of personal information 【小题5】 (lead) to a situation where scammers can easily learn your mother’s name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they’re able to carry out individually 【小题6】 (target) campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from 【小题7】 looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller's, tricking you into “confirming” your address, mother’s name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be 【小题8】 (bad) hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice manipulation technologies【小题9】weaken that gradually.
We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone carriers and consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications — using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, 【小题10】 can be tied to your identity.
Credibility is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going to get harder from here on out.
