Nelle Harper Lee, better known by her pen name Harper Lee, was an American novelist widely known for To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960. Immediately successful, it won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modem American literature. In 1991 an organization conducted a survey that made readers identify books that had “made a difference” in their lives. The result? Lee’s book trailed only The Bible. Alongside the works of Shakespeare and Twain, this novel remains one of the most widely taught books nationwide, reaching about 70% of American public schools. What makes it such a typical read for young people?
English class is a place where young Americans come to know themselves. In the folds of dusty books, students can make contact with humanity beyond the shallow small talk of the school hallways. Disturbed by hormones (荷尔蒙)and anxiety, teenagers get through school with confusion and frustration. Literature is a safety valve (安全阀) 一 it promises relief, a place to figure out one's problems and get to know oneself better.
The novel particularly distinguishes itself in this aspect. It speaks in a child’s voice without treating its readership as children. Some critics have called it an “impossible” achievement, a children's book penned by a well-educated adult — it’s unlikely that a child like Scout could exist in the real world. But that’s exactly what makes it such a charming, attractive read for young people. It indicates the consciousness of a well-educated adult facing difficult realities, but describes it through the light and playful voice of a curious little girl.
Gaby Hick, a third-year student focused on English literature at Brown University, calls it “one of the first books that kids and young adults read that deals with serious issues —rape, race, mental issues”. She adds, “The story makes these adult themes accessible because of Scout.” The book’s setting, a small town in Alabama affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s, may appear very different from the experience of most kids reading it today. But Lee’s words make her story feel alive and present.
In 2006, however, critic Thomas Mallon expressed his regret about the book’s avoiding complexity in The New Yorker. But her novel makes a great teaching tool for teenagers precisely because its moral view is as clear as that of one of Aesop's Fables. That absence of ambiguity (含糊其辞) in this novel doesn’t mean the novel is free of challenging ideas, either. Will Serratelli, another literature student at Brown says, “There aren’t many hard moral questions being asked …but it opens up all these other questions that 1 hadn’t thought about before. My English teachers always asked, ‘Do you sympathize (同情) with this character? Would you want to hang out with them?’ When you give a kid a book where those questions don’t even need to be asked, it forces them to dig deeper.”
Mallon's criticism is accurate in that this novel may present too limited a view of racism in America. That's especially problematic because it is one of the only books consistently assigned to American students that acknowledges (承认) racial discrimination (歧视) at all. However, To Kill a Mockingbird may owe some of its popularity as a teaching text to the fact that the narrative voice is a white one. Naomi Vamis, an African Studies student at Brown says, “It’s another practice of telling stories about black people through white central characters,” she says.
While the novel is undoubtedly worth its place in the classroom, English teachers may do well to consider that it is a white author’s perspective — and ought to be the only beginning of a dialogue about race and never the final word. But as a gateway to more mature ideas, and as a YA (young adult) distillation (提炼) of complex concepts young people may not have grasped before, Lee’s novel is invaluable.
【小题1】According to the passage, the novel To Kill a Mockingbird can help us .| A．reduce much anxiety for fear of losing ourselves |
| B．understand what the real personality of human is |
| C．know more about the past U.S. economic situation |
| D．find and deal with some other complicated questions |
| A．Was as good as. | B．Tried hard to defeat. |
| C．Went along the same route as. | D．Had a lower score than. |
| A．The kids are unwilling to answer challenging questions. |
| B．The kids have to face more moral questions. |
| C．The kids tend to sympathize with the characters. |
| D．The kids are motivated to think further. |
| A．Because it reveals racial discrimination in America. |
| B．Because a white author tells the stories about black people. |
| C．Because it makes some serious adult issues accessible. |
| D．Because it is widely used as a tool for moral judgments in society. |
| A．To tell us about the content of the novel. |
| B．To explain the reasons for its popularity. |
| C．To introduce some different comments. |
| D．To approve of the creative writing style. |
Communities across the world are starting to ban facial recognition technologies. The efforts are well intentioned, but banning facial recognition is the wrong way to fight against modern surveillance （监 视）.Generally, modern mass surveillance has three broad components: identification, correlation and discrimination.
Facial recognition is a technology that can be used to identify people without their consent. Once we are identified, the data about who we are and what we are doing can be correlated with other data. This might be movement data, which can be used to "follow” us as we move throughout our day. It can be purchasing data, Internet browsing data, or data about who we talk to via email or text. It might be data about our income, ethnicity, lifestyle, profession and interests. There is an entire industry of data brokers who make a living by selling our data without our consent.
It's not just that they know who we are; it's that they correlate what they know about us to create profiles about who we are and what our interests are. The whole purpose of this process is for companies to treat individuals differently. We are shown different ads on the Internet and receive different offers for credit cards. In the future, we might be treated differently when we walk into a store, just as we currently are when we visit websites.
It doesn't matter which technology is used to identify people. What's important is that we can be consistently identified over time. We might be completely anonymous （匿名的）in a system that uses unique cookies to track us as we browse the Internet, but the same process of correlation and discrimination still occurs.
Regulating this system means addressing all three steps of the process. A ban on facial recognition won't make any difference. The problem is that we are being identified without our knowledge or consent, and society needs rules about when that is permissible.
Similarly, we need rules about how our data can be combined with other data, and then bought and sold without our knowledge or consent. The data broker industry is almost entirely unregulated now. Reasonable laws would prevent the worst of their abuses.
Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for companies to discriminate. Discrimination based on protected characteristics like race and gender is already illegal, but those rules are ineffectual against the current technologies of surveillance and control. When people can be identified and their data correlated at a speed and scale previously unseen, we need new rules.
Today, facial recognition technologies are receiving the force of the tech backlash （抵制），but focusing on them misses the point. We need to have a serious conversation about all the technologies of identification, correlation and discrimination, and decide how much we want to be spied on and what sorts of influence we want them to have over our lives.
【小题1】According to Para. 2, with facial recognition _______.| A．one’s lifestyle changes greatly |
| B．one's email content is disclosed |
| C．one's profiles are updated in time |
| D．one's personal information is released |
| A．discrimination based on new tech surveillance is illegal |
| B．different browsing data bring in different advertisements |
| C．using mobiles anonymously keeps us from being correlated |
| D．data brokers control the current technologies of surveillance |
| A．people's concern over their safety |
| B．the nature of the surveillance society |
| C．proper regulation of mass surveillance |
| D．the importance of identification technology |
| A．call for banning facial recognition technologies |
| B．advocate the urgent need for changes in related laws |
| C．inform readers of the disadvantages of facial recognition |
| D．evaluate three broad components in modem mass surveillance |
You are just waking up in the spring of 2030. Your Internet of Things bedroom opens solar-powered e-windows and plays gentle music while your smart lighting displays a montage(蒙太奇) of beachfront sunrises from your recent vacation.
Your shower uses very little water or soap. It recycles your grey water and puts the extra heat back into your home's integrated operating system. While you dress, your artificial intelligence (Al) assistant shares your schedule for the day and plays your favourite tunes.
You still start your day with caffeine but it comes from your loT refrigerator which is capable of providing a coffeehouse experience in your home. A hot breakfast tailored to your specific nutritional needs (based on chemical analysis from your trips to the "smart toilet") is waiting for you in the kitchen.
When it's time to leave, an on-demand transport system has three cars waiting for you, your spouse and your kids. On the road, driverless cars and trucks move with mathematical precision, without traffic jams. Accident rates are near zero.
En route, you call your R&.D team, who are wrapping up a day's work in Shanghai. Your life-sized image will be projected,which makes your colleagues see you as if you were sitting with them. It's a bit surreal(超现实的)for them to see you in the morning light given that it's dark on the Bund, Shanghai's waterfront, though the novelty fades after a few uses.
You review the day's cloud-based data from your Shenzhen manufacturing centre, your pilot project in San Diego, and your QA team in Melbourne. The massive datasets are collected in realtime from every piece of equipment and have been beautifully summarized by your company's AI. All these facilities are closely maintained and operated via a skilled predictive analytics platform. Pleased with the team's progress, you end the call and ease into a good book. This is the future and it will be here sooner than you think.
【小题1】What will happen when you dress yourself according to the text?| A．Your schedule is sent to your boss. |
| B．Bedroom opens quickly. |
| C．Your favourite tunes are played. |
| D．Your coffee is ordered and served. |
| A．Made specially. |
| B．Mixed similarly. |
| C．Produced in advance. |
| D．Invented traditionally. |
| A．Because the team makes progress. |
| B．Because your images are wrapped up. |
| C．Because you did it ahead of time. |
| D．Because your life-sized picture is projected. |
| A．Why we need AI assistants. |
| B．What life will be like in 2030. |
| C．How we find meaningful work in the future. |
| D．How AI helps you lead an important life. |
Imagine a world without insects. It might sound good at first without creepy-crawly bugs and annoying flies in your apartment. However, the consequences would be disastrous.
The number of insects has dropped by more than half in the past decades, according to British biologist Dave Goulson, author of Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse. As insects make up most of the known species on this planet, this data is not good news.
Insects are indeed on the path to extinction, according to the first global scientific review of insect population decline, which was published in the journal Biological Conservation in January 2019. The researchers say intensive agriculture has been the main cause of the decline. Pesticides (杀虫剂), in particular, destroy insect habitats. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors. “Unless we convert our ways of producing food, insects will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.”
What would happen to Earth without insects? It’s almost impossible to predict, but the consequences would be far—reaching. We need insects to pollinate (授粉) crops, recycle plant and animal material, keep the soil healthy and much more. Without insects, many animals would have nothing to eat, and the predators (捕食者) of those animals would go hungry as well. The ecosystem would be thrown off balance.
“If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet’s ecosystems and for the survival of mankind,” said Sanchez-Bayo, one of the authors of the review. The first step to halt this process is “to engender a society that values the natural world, both for what it does for us and for its own sake”, Sanchez—Bayo suggests. “The obvious place to start is with our children, encouraging environmental awareness from an early age.”
【小题1】What’s people’s general impression of insects?| A．Quite unpleasant. | B．Very interesting. |
| C．Extremely helpful. | D．Unexpectedly disastrous. |
| A．Change. | B．Abandon. | C．Expand. | D．Simplify. |
| A．Insects ensure the earth’s diversity. |
| B．Insects maintain the earth ecosystem. |
| C．Insects make the soil dry and healthy. |
| D．Insects help slow down climate change. |
| A．Exploit nature in a gentle way. |
| B．Change our way of producing food. |
| C．Educate younger generation to be aware of it. |
| D．Provide insects with enough habitats and food. |
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