Directions: After reading the passages 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 farm of the given word; far the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
When Steve Birkinshaw, the British fell running (越野路跑)champion, planned his record- breaking route across the 214 peaks of the Lake District, it took him six months of preparation and all his years of experience to figure out 【小题1】he thought was the perfect path.
Now two physics students from the University of Manchester who had never visited the mountains have produced a 【小题2】(short) route using a computer algorithm.
Mr Birkinshaw, 52, a researcher at Newcastle University who lives in the Lake District, has had an admirable fell running career, including breaking the 72-year-old record set by Joss Naylor 【小题3】climbing the 214 peaks in the Lake District in only six days and 13 hours in 2014. His record was beaten by seven hours in 2019 by Paul Tierney, who followed Birkinshaw’s carefully mapped route over 512km and 36,000m of climbing.
Mr Birkinshaw, who advised the students, thought 【小题4】 would be impossible to improve the route with a computer, ” but they 【小题5】 (prove) me wrong“, he said.
“The problem is you change one thing in the route and it’s a domino effect and everything else changes. I would have to spend two to three hours a week for six months 【小题6】 (redraw) the route on a computer to work out how long a slight adjustment would change the time 【小题7】 now they have the algorithms they can put in all the peaks and find out instantly?”
To figure out their route, the pair used satellite imaging data of the area, with 【小题8】 complex data functions were coupled to describe how fest people can move along different routes. This allowed them to work out the energy costs of moving between each peak.
They 【小题9】(feed) all that information into an off-the-shelf solver for the travelling salesman problem, a classic computational science problem for finding out the fastest delivery routes along road networks. Their achievement opens up possibilities to update running records and 【小题10】one day help to deliver aid in badly mapped areas of the world.
