II. Grammar and Vocabulary
Section A
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.
Tall, young and active
November 14, 1963 was a cold morning. This was nothing out of the ordinary for the fisherman. They were used to the winter weather around Iceland. Suddenly, however, they saw something unusual. Thick, black smoke was pouring out of the sea. ____1____ (think) a boat was on fire, they raced toward it. Yet as they got closer, they realized it was ____2____ quite different. Magma (岩浆) was rubbing away from the ocean floor. The fishermen watched as a new island rose from the sea. This island, later ____3____ (name) Surtsey, joined the thousands of volcanic islands worldwide.
The island of Hawaii is one of the most well-known volcanic islands. Lava (熔岩) from multiple volcanoes built this island. One of these volcanoes is Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea began under the ocean over 1 million years ago. Magma broke through the Earth’s crust- that is, the outer layer of the earth. ____4____ the magma cooled, it formed an underwater mountain. About 100,000 years ago, the mountain rose ____5____ sea level. Eruption (喷发) then became more frequent and more violent. Layers of lava hardened into rock. Now, Mauna Kea ____6____ (measure) 9,966 meters from ocean floor to mountain peak, making it the world’s highest mountain.
Fortunately for Hawaiians, Mauna Kea volcano is quiet - for the time being. ____7____ volcano on the same island is anything but quiet. Kilauea is smaller than Mauna Kea. However, it has erupted nonstop since 1983 and is the world’s most active volcano, ____8____ produces between 300,000 and 600,000 m2 of lava every day. Over the past two decades. It ____9____ (add) more than 540 acres to the island. In spite of the danger, it is a popular tourist attraction. Yet, ____10____ this popular tourist attraction contributes to the Hawaiian economy financially also comes at a cost. Kilauea is responsible for taking both lives and homes.
Section B
Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.
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A. conquered B. crossing C. embarrass D. fooling E. hugely F. independent
G. licensed H. set I. subconsciously J. tripping K. typical
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What makes a problem “hard”?
There is a saying in the filed of artificial intelligence: “Hard things are easy; easy things are hard.” Activities that most people find very hard, such as playing chess or doing highest mathematics, have given way fairly readily to computation, yet many tasks that humans find easy or even trivial resist being ____11____ by machines.
Twenty-five years ago Garry Kasparov became the first chess grand master to lose to computer. Today computer programs can beat the world’s best players at poker and Go, what music and even pass the famous Turing test ____12____ people into thinking they are talking another human. Yet computers still struggle to do things most of us human beings find easy, what can ____13____ even the most advanced machines, such as learning to speak our native tongue or predicting from body language whether a pedestrian is about to cross the street - something that human drivers do ____14____.
AI researchers will tell you that chess turned out to be comparatively easy because it follows ____15____ rules that create a finite number of possible plays. Predicting the intentions of a pedestrian, however, is a more complex and fluid task that is had to reduce to rules. No doubt that is true, but I think there is a bigger lesson in the AI experience that applies to more urgent problems. Let’s call it the vaccine-vaccination paradox.
Anyone familiar with biology is ____16____ impressed by the scientific work that in under a year yielded astonishingly effective vaccines to fight COVID-19. Yet even several months after the vaccines were ____17____ for use, it is extremely hard to get all the countries fully vaccinated, especially in some part of the western world. The hard task of creating a vaccine proved relatively easy; the easy task of vaccination has proved very hard.
Maybe it is time to rethink our categories. We call the physical sciences “hard” because they deal with issues that are mostly ____18____ of the changes of human nature; they often laws that (at least in the right circumstances) yield exact answers. But physics and chemistry will never tell us how to design an effective vaccination program or solve the problem of the ____19____ pedestrian, in part because they do not help us comprehend human behavior. The social sciences rarely yield exact answers. But that does not make them easy. When it comes to solving real-life problems, it is the supposedly straightforward ones that seem to be _____20_____ us. The vaccine-vaccination paradox suggests that the truly hard sciences are those that involve human behavior.
