Section 2 Reading Comprehension(In this section you will find after each of the passages a number of questions or unfinished statements about the passage, each with 4 (A, B, C and D) choices to answer the question or complete the statement You must choose the one which you think fits best Blacken the corresponding letter as required on your machine-scoring ANSWER SHEET.)
1.U.S.job growth was surprisingly strong in 2018, but don't expect that to happen again this year, with economic headwinds intensifying for the country and rest of the world. The federal government’s final employment report for 2018 is forecast to show employers added 180,000 jobs in December to bring the annual increase to 2.45 million, the most since 2015 一 but the monthly estimate is the lowest median projection since last January.Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect that to slow in 2019 to an average monthly pace of 156,000, for a total of 1.87 million, followed by 1.44 million in 2020, when President Trump is up for reelection. Other key labor measures aren't expected to improve far beyond current levels by year end.Economists project the jobless rate held steady last month at 3.7%, the lowest since 1969, and will edge down to 3.5% at the end of 2019.Wage gains last month are expected to have eased to 3% year-over-year from a post-recession high of 3.1% and then modestly reaccelerate during the year. The prospect of less-robust job growth is the latest in a slew of risks stacking up for the world's largest economy.It comes alongside warning signs from housing and manufacturing, among other industries, and projected weakening in both U.S.and global growth this year.A waning boost from Trump ,s tax cuts and government spending will add to policymakers? challenges. “The economy accelerated in 2018 and employment with it for a pretty simple and obvious reason: We had a pretty big fiscal stimulus,M said Lewis Alexander, chief U.S.economist at Nomura Securities International.“The boost to growth from fiscal policy is not sustainable” he said, adding that he expects slowing of the economic expansion and employment growth. Data released Thursday by the ADP Research Institute indicated that companies in December added the most workers to U.S.payrolls in almost two years.Private payrolls grew by 271,000, exceeding forecasts, after a downward-revised 157,000 advance in November.A Labor Department report Thursday showed filings for unemployment benefits rose to a four-week high of 231,000 in the week that ended Dec.29, exceeding the median estimate of economists in Bloomberg's survey. Barclays sees payroll growth slowing from an average pace of about 200,000 a month last year to about 160,000 a month this year.“Our outlook for slower growth in activity in 2019 relative to last year on account of a smaller impulse from fiscal stimulus leads us to expect less employment growth this year,” chief U.S.economist Michael Gapen said in a note.The jobs report for November showed a payroll increase of 155,000, a tally that missed all estimates in Bloomberg's survey calling for a gain of 198,000.The same report revised the October reading down to 237,000, from 250,000. Maintaining strength in hiring may depend on continued contributions in key sectors such as manufacturing, which even before the December figures had added more jobs than any year since 1997.A Labor Department report due out Friday is forecast to show factory jobs rose by 20,000, which would bring the full-year increase to 269,000.Mining and natural resources jobs are within reach of their best gain since 2011, and construction is holding up.For private services jobs, more than half the 1.68 million hires on the books for 2018 have been in education and health services, and professional and business services. Federal Reserve policymakers have stayed sanguine on the labor market, with Chairman Jerome Powell noting that increasing tightness should help keep inflation around the central bank's 2% objective.Fed officials at their final 2018 meeting kept their end- of-2019 jobless rate forecast at 3.5%. But as downbeat reports stack up, pressure increases on the Fed to signal a pause on interest-rate increases.Policymakers have said they intend to slow the pace of hikes this year.As they raised rates in December, they penciled in just two hikes for 2019, the median projection of governors and district presidents shows.That’s still more than many investors anticipate, with rate futures pointing to no moves in 2019 and a potential rate cut next year. （选自《洛杉矶时报》2019年1月4日）
【正确答案-参考解析】：参加考试可见2.AlphaZero seems to express insight.It plays like no computer ever has, intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style.It plays gambits and takes risks.In some games it paralyzed Stockfish and toyed with it.While conducting its attack in Game 10, AlphaZero retreated its queen back into the comer of the board on its own side，far from Stockfish's king, not normally where an attacking queen should be placed. Yet this peculiar retreat was venomous: No matter how Stockfish replied, it was doomed.It was almost as if AlphaZero was waiting for Stockfish to realize, after billions of brutish calculations, how hopeless its position truly was, so that the beast could relax and expire peacefully, like a vanquished bull before a matador.Grandmasters had never seen anything like it.AlphaZero had the finesse of a virtuoso and the power of a machine.It was humankind's first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence. When AlphaZero was first unveiled, some observers complained that Stockfish had been lobotomized by not giving it access to its book of memorized openings.This time around, even with its book, it got crushed again.And when AlphaZero handicapped itself by giving Stockfish ten times more time to think, it still destroyed the brute.Tellingly, AlphaZero won by thinking smarter, not faster; it examined only 60 thousand positions a second, compared to 60 million for Stockfish.It was wiser, knowing what to think about and what to ignore.By discovering the principles of chess on its own, AlphaZero developed a style of play that “reflects the truth” about the game rather than “the priorities and prejudices of programmers，” Mr.Kasparov wrote in a commentary accompanying the Science article. The question now is whether machine learning can help humans discover similar truths about the things we really care about: the great unsolved problems of science and medicine, such as cancer and consciousness; the riddles of the immune system, the mysteries of the genome. The early signs are encouraging.Last August, two articles in Nature Medicine explored how machine learning could be applied to medical diagnosis.In one, researchers at DeepMind teamed up with clinicians at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London to develop a deep-learning algorithm that could classify a wide range of retinal pathologies as accurately as human experts can.(Ophthalmology suffers from a severe shortage of experts who can interpret the millions of diagnostic eye scans performed each year; artificially intelligent assistants could help enormously.) The other article concerned a machine-learning algorithm that decides whether a CT scan of an emergency-room patient shows signs of a stroke, an intracranial hemorrhage or other critical neurological event.For stroke victims, every minute matters; the longer treatment is delayed, the worse the outcome tends to be.(Neurologists have a grim saying: “Time is brain.”）The new algorithm flagged these and other critical events with an accuracy comparable to human experts 一 but it did so 150 times faster.A faster diagnostician could allow the most urgent cases to be triaged sooner, with review by a human radiologist. What is frustrating about machine learning, however, is that the algorithms can't articulate what they're thinking.We don't know why they work, so we don't know if they can be trusted.AlphaZero gives every appearance of having discovered some important principles about chess, but it can't share that understanding with us.Not yet, at least.As human beings, we want more than answers.We want insight.This is going to be a source of tension in our interactions with computers from now on. In fact, in mathematics, it's been happening for years already.Consider the longstanding math problem called the four-color map theorem.It proposes that, under certain reasonable constraints, any map of contiguous countries can always be colored with just four colors such that no two neighboring countries are colored the same. Although the four-color theorem was proved in 1977 with the help of a computer, no human could check all the steps in the argument.Since then, the proof has been validated and simplified, but there are still parts of it that entail brute-force computation, of the kind employed by AlphaZero’s chess-playing computer ancestors.This development annoyed many mathematicians.They didn’t need to be reassured that the four-color theorem was true; they already believed it.They wanted to understand why it was true, and this proof didn't help.
【正确答案-参考解析】：参加考试可见Section 3 Cloze Test(In the following passage, there are 20 blanks representing words that are missing from the context.Below the passage，each blank has 4 choices marked by letters A, B, C and D respectively.There is only ONE right answer.Blacken the corresponding letter as required on your machine-scoring ANSWER SHEET.)
1. Science Without Borders Science and technology is among the factors that have taken the human civilization to the level it enjoys today. Every milestone in scientific and technological______(91) has taken society a step forward. Numerous scientific innovations that enjoyed their heyday in history were later______(92) by new ones. Today, although we still admire those inventors, we are not awe-struck （惊叹的）by their innovations or inventions as we now boast of science and technology much more ______(93) than in the past. Will the science and technology of our times______(94) forever?______(95). In the future, people will view today's science and technology just as we______(96) those of centuries ago. Therefore, technicians and scientists ought to______(97) full play to their innovations during the latter's limited “shelf life.”______(98), the application and spread of advanced science and technology has been hitting man-made snags (障碍）in today's world.Many of these______(99) are imposed by the developed West. Science and technology is a______(100) that belongs to all mankind.To prevent its spread and exchange of scientific data for the sake of narrow interests is a selfish act. The International Space Station, a manned space laboratory that saw the first launch in 1998, will complete its —______(101) in 2020 and then go out of orbit, falling into the sea.By then, China will have established its own space station, ______(102) will be the only one of its kind in space at that time. China has expressed its______(103) to share the space station with the rest of the world.But if U.S. politicians continue ______(104) their obstruction, it will be impossible for U.S. aerospace workers to use the Chinese space station. The 5G communication technology, or 5G, is______(105) the most advanced in the world.Communication technology has been ______(106) by leaps and bounds. It took less than 10 years to develop 3G from 2G and then just three years to leap to 4G. Now communication technology has entered the 5G era, which will help further develop the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. Both China and the United States are frontrunners in 5G technology. U.S. telecom companies and consumers have a ______(107) demand for Huawei's 5G equipment but have been blocked access because of U.S. politicians5 focus on their own interests. However, 5G is not the end of communication technology. In the near future, quite possibly, it will be replaced by quantum communication technology. The space station technology of today will also be replaced by new ones. One day in future, human beings ______(108) be able to undertake interplanetary journeys as easily as they travel by plane from one country to another. Focusing on immediate interests and______(109) a blind eye to the future will hamper science workers' efforts to maximize the benefits of science and technology and will also affect entire society. The world needs a ______(110) to maximize the benefits of science and technology, condemn efforts to impose borders on science, and seek to remove restraints on communication.
【正确答案-参考解析】：参加考试可见
