2016年12月英语四级阅读长篇阅读练习(八)

　　Into an Unknown World

　　A、Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers.Self-driving cars restrict old.school human drivers to special recreation parks.And the optimal(最佳的)number offingers is 12.5.

　　B、Confused?It’s a vision of the world in 25 years，as dreamed up by today’s researchers in computer-human interaction(CHI).

　　C、CHI normally means investigating better ways for people to interact with devices we have now,but last week attendees at the annual conference in Toront0，Canada，got ahead of themselves.They created an imaginary conference agenda for 2039 that predicts the kinds of challenges we will face with future computers--many of which will be implanted.

　　D、“It’s meant to be sort of the fringes(边缘)of human--computer interaction research，what’s really edgy or provocative，”says Eric Baumer of Cornell University in Ithaca，New York，who dreamed up the idea of the conference.“There’s a lot of retrospective thinking about the past，but there’s not as much thinking about what are the futures toward which we think we’re working.”

　　E、We used the abstracts to create a list of the questions we—or more accurately.our cyborg descendants--might have about computers in 2039.

　　Is it weird when my organs talk to each other?

　　F、In an abstract entitled“My liver and my kidney compared notes”，IBM researcher Michael Muller,based in Cambridge，Massachusetts，looks at what happens when the implanted monitors on people’s intemal organs—a network he calls Arterionet--are able to share data and pool knowledge to offer enhanced health tips.

　　G、His conclusion：“While most users were skeptical.many users proposed additional features that could lead to greater acceptance and compliance with such recommendations.”

　　H、It’s worth thinking about how people might deal with health tips from organ monitors.Wearable technology that tracks your activity or your health status is slowly gaining popularity while researchers earlier this year implanted power-generating silicone strips on the hearts，lungs and diaphragms(横膈膜) of live cows，pigs and sheep.Muller says the biggest challenge to creating Arterionet will be figuring out how to fit the artificial intelligence in a sufficiently small and safe package.

　　Why do plants need their own Facebook,again?

　　I、To understand this question，you need to know about Plantastic，the brainchild of Bill Tomlinson and his colleagues at the University of California at Irvine.

　　J、In their abstract，they reason that to make our food supply more sustainable，it may make sense to grow more fruits and vegetables close to home.But certain crops thrive when they’re grown in large quantities or alongside certain other plants--too tall all order for the average farmer.

　　K、Enter Plantastic，which would advise what plants would work best for your area and tell you what people in the neighbourhood are growin9.Nanochips on plants would feed data back to the site.That information in turn could be used to 1earn more about what grows best in which environment.

　　L、Assuming people will want to know whether this adds anythin9，Tomlinson’s team created a fictional(虚构的)study that looks at l o backyard gardens over two growing seasons.It suggests that using Plantastic will increase yields by 4 to 12 percent.

　　M、Tomlinson’s graduate student Juliet Norton is working on an early version of what the online system might look like.

　　Autonomous cars have made driving so boring--what shall I do instead?

　　N、Andreas Riener at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Linz.Austria，has written an abstract that starts with a bold view of the future：“The first self-driving car cruised on our roads in 2019.Now,20 years after,it is time to review how this innovation has changed our mobility behaviour.”