Wildlife conservation programs are a great way to get involved in the preservation of endangered species, as well as learn how you can help protect them. If you are a wildlife lover, here are some programs you can choose.
•Animal Rescue Project, South Africa
You will be working with experienced conservationists in Cape Town. A significant challenge is to find new homes for homeless dogs and cats. The project comprises two sections: a fully equipped animal hospital and an adoption center focusing on securing new homes. Due to limited funding, the center can only afford a small number of permanent staff, relying heavily on wildlife lovers to assist with daily tasks and provide hands-on care for these animals.
•Sea Turtle Conservation Project, Sri Lanka
Recent years have witnessed a significant decline in the sea turtle's numbers due to numerous commercial fishing. As a wildlife lover, your role extends to supporting hatcheries(孵化场) in their conservation efforts. Additionally, your involvement helps these hatcheries with funds, as we provide a placement fee for each wildlife lover, enabling them to generate additional income.
•Wildlife Conservation Program, Australia
You will be engaged in activities such as animal feeding, cleaning, maintenance, and enrichment. This program provides an incredible opportunity to gain firsthand international work experience. For you, this program is an excellent choice. Not only will you contribute to a noble cause, but it also offers a fantastic opportunity to meet people from around the world.
•Marine Conservation Program, Bali
You will be working in Tianyar, where the reef is now in a worsening state. The project was initiated to restore and conserve Tianyar's coral reef, not only to protect its remarkable and delicate ecosystems but also to secure a sustainable future for the residents.
Our species' incredible capacity to quickly acquire words from 300 by age 2 to over 1, 000 by age 4 isn't fully understood. Some cognitive scientists and linguists have theorized that people are born with built-in expectations and logical constraints (约束) that make this possible. Now, however, machine-learning research is showing that preprogrammed assumptions aren't necessary to swiftly pick up word meanings from minimal data.
A team of scientists has successfully trained a basic artificial intelligence model to match images to words using just 61 hours of naturalistic footage (镜头) and sound-previously collected from a child named Sam in 2013 and 2014. Although it's a small slice of a child's life, it was apparently enough to prompt the AI to figure out what certain words mean.
The findings suggest that language acquisition could be simpler than previously thought. Maybe children "don't need a custom-built, high-class language-specific mechanism" to efficiently grasp word meanings, says Jessica Sullivan, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore College. "This is a really beautiful study, " she says, because it offers evidence that simple information from a child's worldview is rich enough to kick-start pattern recognition and word comprehension.
The new study also demonstrates that it's possible for machines to learn similarly to the way that humans do. Large language models are trained on enormous amounts of data that can include billions and sometimes trillions of word combinations. Humans get by on orders of magnitude less information, says the paper's lead author Wai Keen Vong. With the right type of data, that gap between machine and human learning could narrow dramatically.
Yet additional study is necessary in certain aspects of the new research. For one, the scientists acknowledge that their findings don't prove how children acquire words. Moreover, the study only focused on recognizing the words for physical objects.
Still, it's a step toward a deeper understanding of our own mind, which can ultimately help us improve human education, says Eva Portelance, a computational linguistics researcher. She notes that AI research can also bring clarity to long-unanswered questions about ourselves. "We can use these models in a good way, to benefit science and society, " Portelance adds.
Sam Altman, CEO of the San Francisco startup OpenAI that developed ChatGPT, his company's chatbot tool, on Tuesday urged US lawmakers to regulate artificial intelligence "We think that regulatory intervention (干预) by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models. My worst fears are that we, the field, the technology industry cause significant harm to the world. " Altman said.
"I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that, "Altman added. "We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening
The 38-year-old Stanford University dropout said the potential for AI to be used to influence voters is among "my areas of greatest concern", especially because "we're going to face an election next year and these models are getting better". He said his company's technology may destroy some jobs but also create new ones and that it will be important for government to figure out how we want to reduce that". Altman said the government could regulate the industry by creating an agency that issues licenses for the creation of large-scale AI models, safety regulations and tests that AI models must pass before being released to the public.
The rapid development of ChatGPT with an estimated 100 million users within two months has sparked an industry race, with Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, enabling ChatGPT in the Windows operating system and Google adding its own so-called generative AI systems including one called Bard, to its app. The latest forms of AI also have drawn criticism from some of tech's biggest names for their potential to disrupt(扰乱)millions of jobs and spread misinformation.
Altman said OpenAI pretests and constantly updates its tools to ensure safety and that making them widely available to the public actually helps the company identify and mitigate risks.
Minimizing the environmental damage that new roads cause is generally regarded as a good thing. But to do that, it helps to understand just how new roads cause the damage of which they are accused.
Recently, a group of researchers led by Dr. Gonzalez conducted an experiment and proved that immigration is good for the health of animal populations. A road destroys only a small part of the habitat, thus destroying just a few local populations of creatures. So the argument that road-building itself is bad for biodiversity is not self-evidently correct. Those who nevertheless hold this view say that apparently separate local populations of animals are, in fact, parts of much larger populations connected via migration.
According to this theory, when a local population struggles to move about – because of an epidemic, for example – individuals from neighboring communities can fill the gaps.
The implications of the theory are straightforward. Cut local populations off from each other and each is more likely to disappear. And roads are good at doing just that. Testing the theory with experimental roads, however, would be expensive. Dr. Gonzalez's brainwave was to do the whole thing on a much smaller scale.
The team studied moss-covered rocks. On some rocks the researchers left the moss untouched; on others they made "roadways" across to leave the moss isolated. After waiting six months, they found that in the disturbed habitats nearly all the bug population had declined compared with undisturbed moss, and 40% of the species had become extinct.
The real test came in the second part of the experiment. In this, the researchers removed moss much as before, but they left narrow moss paths to bridge the no-bug's-land between islands. The islands with bridges did far better than isolated islands – a result that supports the notion that population exchange is necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy.
Whether these results can be translated to large-scale ecosystems remains uncertain. But if they can, they would cause more, not less, concern about the ecological effects of road-building. On the other hand, they also suggest a way out. In Britain, tunnels are often built under roads for animals of regular habits, such as badgers(獾), to be able to travel their traditional routes without having to fight with traffic. Extending that principle, perhaps special bridges might be a cheap way of letting man and nature rub along a bit better.
Who can imagine life today without an Automated Teller Machine（ATM）? They are available in considerable numbers throughout the world.
The first ATM was the brainchild of an enterprising Turkish-American inventor Luther George Simjian. When the idea of an automated banking machine struck him, he registered 20 patents before any bank agreed to give it a trial run. It is easy to assume that the inventor of such a popular machine was laughing all the way to the bank. Within six months of its operation in New York in 1939, the device was removed due to lack of customer acceptance.
It was not until 1967, nearly 30 years later, that Barclays Bank, in a careful launch, rolled out a self-service machine in London, England, which proved successful. The first cash machine relied on customers' use of prepaid tokens（代币）to get envelopes with a fixed amount of cash inside.
The banks' principle was seemingly customer service. But it would be foolish to minimize the many advantages that cash machines provided to the banks themselves. By the late 1970s, the highest fixed cost for the average large bank was its branches. The greatest variable cost and loss to profits were its staff. Ban k accounts swiftly recognized that self-service operations could reduce bank branch staff cost by70 percent.
Experts quickly determined that public acceptance of ATMs counted on convenience, simplicity, speed, security and trust. For maximum efficiency, ATMs had to be located near public transport or in a shopping mall, not at a branch. The busier and more crowded the location, obviously, the better. Now, roughly 75percent of all cash provided by banks to their customers comes from cash machines..
Public acceptance of deposits（存款）by machine was significantly slower than customers' usage of ATMs for withdrawals. In general, it seems that customers sometimes still prefer and trust an over-the-counter transaction（交易）for deposits.
A．Location, in particular, was a key factor.
B．His cash machine, however, didn't prove durable.
C．The device was relatively primitive, at least by today's standards.
D．However, cash machines posed some interesting, unanswered questions.
E．An interesting factor was the issue of bio-statistics for customer identification.
F．Devices originally dismissed by the public are now recognized as essential institutions.
G．Soon afterwards, many other banks became admittedly champions of the cash machine.
Have you ever heard of and seen Canadian geese? Do you know that they 1 fresh grass and seeds?
Canadian geese have a good 2 for their politeness. They always bow down to you whenever you walk by. However, I have recently found that they can sometimes be 3 to their peers, especially on occasions when they quarrel for food——yes, these 4 gentlemen do quarrel, just for something to eat
Yesterday I witnessed two Canadian Geese arguing 5 for a clump(草丛) of beautiful fresh grass. The clump was 6 right in the middle of them, while the two were shouting noisily, stretching their necks as long as they could to look aggressively at each other. It's 7 to witness the "impolite" side of Canadian geese. Hence, I couldn't help 8 my morning walk, standing still to watch these "gentlemen" quarreling. Interestingly, after a short while, a truck roared past their feast, disturbing their 9 conversation. The two geese were equally 10 by the massive "monster", thus giving up their conversation.
Would they start quarreling again? I stood still, 11 the ridiculous question and waited. Beyond my expectation, right after the truck's passing by, the two geese immediately lost their 12 for quarreling as if they had forgotten all about what had happened. Even the two turned around and left the 13 in opposite directions as if nothing had happened. They left only me there, imagining what might have happened without the 14 .
They got along harmoniously again. Sometimes it's not that bad to be 15 .
Xiao long bao (soup dumplings), those amazing constructions of delicate dumpling wrappers, encasing hot, (taste) soup and sweet, fresh meat, are far and away my favorite Chinese street food. The dumplings arrive steaming and dangerously hot. To eat one, you have to decide whether (bite) a small hole in it first, releasing the stream and risking a spill (溢出), to put the whole dumpling in your mouth, letting the hot soup explode on your tongue. Shanghai may be the (recognize) home of the soup dumplings but food historians will actually point you to the neighboring canal town of Nanxiang as Xiao long Bao's birthplace. There you will find them prepared differently — more dumpling and less soup, and the wrappers are pressed hand rather than rolled. Nanxiang aside, the best Xiao long bao have a fine skin, allowing them (lift) out of the steamer basket without tearing or spilling any of (they) contents. The meat should be fresh with touch of sweetness and the soup hot, clear and delicious.
No matter where I buy them, one steamer is (rare) enough, yet two seems greedy, so I am always left (want) more next time.
A MOTHER'S DAY SURPRISE
The twins were filled with excitement as they thought of the surprise they were planning for Mother's Day. How pleased and proud Mother would be when they brought her breakfast in bed. They planned to make French toast and chicken porridge. They had watched their mother in the kitchen. There was nothing to it. Jenna and Jeff knew exactly what to do.
The big day came at last. The alarm rang at 6 a.m. The pair went down the stairs quietly to the kitchen. They decided to boil the porridge first. They put some rice into a pot of water and left it to boil while they made the French toast. Jeff broke two eggs into a plate and added in some milk. Jenna found the bread and put two slices into the egg mixture. Next, Jeff turned on the second stove burner to heat up the frying pan. Everything was going smoothly until Jeff started frying the bread. The pan was too hot and the bread turned black within seconds. Jenna threw the burnt piece into the sink and put in the other slice of bread. This time, she turned down the fire so it cooked nicely.
Then Jeff noticed steam shooting out of the pot and the lid starting to shake. The next minute, the porridge boiled over and put out the fire. Jenna panicked. Thankfully, Jeff stayed calm and turned off the gas quickly. But the stove was a mess now. Jenna told Jeff to clean it up so they could continue to cook the rest of the porridge. But Jeff's hand touched the hot burner and he gave a cry of pain. Jenna made him put his hand in cold water. Then she caught the smell of burning. Oh dear! The piece of bread in the pan had turned black as well.
注意： 1. 续写词数应为 150 左右
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
| As the twins looked around them in disappointment, their father appeared. The twins carried the breakfast upstairs and woke their mother up. |
