Motoring Techonlogy
　　1.2 million road deaths worldwide occur each year,plus a further 50 million injuries.To reduce car crash rate,much research now is focused on safety and new fuels-though some electric vehicle and biofuel¹ research aims at going faster.　　 

Travelling at speed has always been risky. One cutting edge area² of research in motoring safety is the use of digital in-car assistants³. They can ensure you don’t miss crucial road signs or fall asleep. The use of artificial intelligence software allows these assistants to monitor your driving and makes sure your phone or radio doesn’t distract you at a vital moment. Most crashes result from human and not mechanical faults.
　　Some safety developments aim to improve your vision.Radar can spot⁴ obstacles in fog,while other technology“sees through”high-sided⁵ vehicles blocking your view⁶.
　　And improvements to seat belts,pedal controls and tyres are making driving smoother and safer.The colour of a car has been found to be linked with safety,as have,less surprisingly,size and shape⁷.

And alternatives to fossil-fuel⁸ based petrol, such as plant oils, are a hot area of research. Fuel cells⁹ based on hydrogen bum cleanly, and are the subject of a serious research effort.
　　But whatever is in the fuel tank, you don’t want a thief in the driving seat and there have been many innovations, some using satellite tracking and remote communications¹⁰, to fight against car theft. These communication systems can also come into play¹¹ if you crash, automatically calling for help.
　　Accidents cause many traffic jams,but there are more subtle interplays between vehicles that can cause jams even on a clear but busy road.Such jams can be analyzed using statistical tools.Robotic drivers could be programmed to make traffic flow smoothly and will perhaps one day be everyons’s personal chauffeur(司机),but their latest efforts suggest that won’t be soon.

词汇: 

distract / dɪˈstrækt /v.使……分心，使……分散注意力

hydrogen / ˈhaɪdrədʒən /n.氢

radar / "reɪdɑ:(r) /n.雷达 

innovation / ˌɪnə(ʊ)ˈveʃən /n. 革新，创新

pedal / "pedl /n.制动踏板  

interplay / ˈɪntəpleɪ /n.相互影响；相互作用 fossil-fuel n.矿物燃料  

chauffeur / ˈʃofɚ(r), ʃoˈfɚ(r) /n.（受雇于私人的）汽车司机 

注释： 

1. biofuel:生物燃料。bio(-)用于名词或形容词前，表示“使命”或“生物”。

2. cutting edge area: 最先进的领域。edge: an advantage（优势）

3. in-car assistants:车内辅助设施 4. spot:在此作动词用，意思是:看见。 

5. high-sided:高大的；其反义词为low-sided:矮小的。

6. blocking your view:挡住你的视线 

7. The colour of a car has been found to be linked with safety, as have, less surprisingly, size and shape:人们发现车的颜色与安全有关，令人不会感到惊讶的是，车的大小和形状也与安全有关。as have, less surprisingly, size and shape可以理解为as, less surprisingly, size and shape have been linked with safety。

8. fossil fuel:指煤、石油、天然气等矿物燃料。

9. fuel cell:燃料电池 

10.satellite tracking and remote communications:卫星跟踪和远程通讯

11. come into play:起作用

What is NOT the purpose of innovations that use satellite tracking and remote communications?

A:To prevent car thieves from getting into your car B:To call for help when one’s car crashes. C:To call for help when the car gets jammed in the traffic. D:To track the car down when it is being stolen.

The objective of fast tracking a project is to ______ 。

A:increase productivity B:reduce project duration C:increase schedule tracking controls D:reduce project risks

All the following are benefits of fast tracking a project EXCEPT ______ .

A:facilitates duration compression B:reduces risk C:ensure activities are done in parallel which would normally be done in sequence D:helps shorten the project schedule without changing the project scope

A mandatory traceability system in the United States would help improve the safety of food, such as produce, a health official told lawmakers on Wednesday, and three weeks after the government declared an end to the worst foodborne outbreak in a decade. In the past, some produce firms, including many in the tomato industry, use voluntary traceability programs but their approaches vary.
Lawmakers said a mandatory program was overdue, and would help U.S. regulators improve safety and restore consumer confidence in food following a series of foodborne outbreaks since 2006.
"It is the system that is broken," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture. "You still do not have mandatory traceability, mandatory performance standards. You are looking for a needle in a haystack." Regulators struggled to pinpoint the source of an outbreak of Salmonella St. Paul earlier this year that sickened more than 1,400 people and put 286 in the hospital. They initially focused on tomatoes before shifting their attention to peppers. The slow pace of the investigation, which later traced the Salmonella strain to jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico, has renewed calls for greater monitoring of fresh fruits and vegetables and a national system to track produce.
The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 requires produce processors and distributors to keep track of where food goes and where it came from. This does not include restaurants and farms. "We are going clown a road of examining what is going to work," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s associate commissioner for food protection. He told the subcommittee a mandatory program "would have an impact." Acheson said FDA does not believe it has explicit authority to mandate a tracking system.
The Salmonella outbreak was the latest health scare since 2006. The incidents, involving lettuce, peanut butter, pot pies and spinach, have resulted in dozens of hearings and proposals seeking tougher U.S. safety standards. The latest proposal, which DeLauro plans to introduce next week, would create a separate safety agency within the Department of Health and Human Services to handle all food safety issues currently administered by FDA In a briefing on food issues, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which includes leading companies such as General Mills Inc and ConAgra Foods Inc, expressed doubt that food safety legislation would be passed this year.
Prospects dim further next year with a new administration pursuing its own agenda and congress dealing with other issues including health care and transportation. "This may be our only window for some period of time to actually enact these important reforms," said Scott Faber, a vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers. An estimated 76 million people in the United States get sick every year with foodborne illness and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The example of an outbreak of Salmonella St. Paul is used to ______.

A:show how serious a public sanitary crisis can have B:exemplify how the public investigations often shift their attentions C:blame the slow pace of the investigation D:highlight the urgency of a national tracking system

A mandatory traceability system in the United States would help improve the safety of food, such as produce, a health official told lawmakers on Wednesday, and three weeks after the government declared an end to the worst foodborne outbreak in a decade. In the past, some produce firms, including many in the tomato industry, use voluntary traceability programs but their approaches vary.
Lawmakers said a mandatory program was overdue, and would help U.S. regulators improve safety and restore consumer confidence in food following a series of foodborne outbreaks since 2006.
"It is the system that is broken," said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Appropriations subcommittee on agriculture. "You still do not have mandatory traceability, mandatory performance standards. You are looking for a needle in a haystack." Regulators struggled to pinpoint the source of an outbreak of Salmonella St. Paul earlier this year that sickened more than 1,400 people and put 286 in the hospital. They initially focused on tomatoes before shifting their attention to peppers. The slow pace of the investigation, which later traced the Salmonella strain to jalapeno and serrano peppers from Mexico, has renewed calls for greater monitoring of fresh fruits and vegetables and a national system to track produce.
The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 requires produce processors and distributors to keep track of where food goes and where it came from. This does not include restaurants and farms. "We are going clown a road of examining what is going to work," said David Acheson, the Food and Drug Administration’s associate commissioner for food protection. He told the subcommittee a mandatory program "would have an impact." Acheson said FDA does not believe it has explicit authority to mandate a tracking system.
The Salmonella outbreak was the latest health scare since 2006. The incidents, involving lettuce, peanut butter, pot pies and spinach, have resulted in dozens of hearings and proposals seeking tougher U.S. safety standards. The latest proposal, which DeLauro plans to introduce next week, would create a separate safety agency within the Department of Health and Human Services to handle all food safety issues currently administered by FDA In a briefing on food issues, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which includes leading companies such as General Mills Inc and ConAgra Foods Inc, expressed doubt that food safety legislation would be passed this year.
Prospects dim further next year with a new administration pursuing its own agenda and congress dealing with other issues including health care and transportation. "This may be our only window for some period of time to actually enact these important reforms," said Scott Faber, a vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers. An estimated 76 million people in the United States get sick every year with foodborne illness and 5,000 die, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A:show how serious a public sanitary crisis can have B:exemplify how the public investigations often shift their attentions C:blame the slow pace of the investigation D:highlight the urgency of a national tracking system

第一篇 Eye-tracker Lots You Drag and Drop Files with a Glance Bored of using a mouse? Soon you’ll be able to change stuff on your computer screen – and then move it directly onto your smartphone or tablet(平板电脑) –with nothing more than a glance. A system called EyeDrop uses a head-mounted eye tracker that simultaneously records your field of view so it knows where you are looking on the screen. Gazing at an object – a photo, say – and then pressing a key, selects that object. It can then be moved from the screen to a tablet or smartphone just by glancing at the second device, as long as the two are connected wirelessly. "The beauty of using gaze to support this is that our eyes naturally focus on content that we want to acquire, "says Jayson Turner, who developed the system with colleagues at Lancaster University, UK. Turner believes EyeDrop would be useful to transfer an interactive map or contact information from a public display to your smartphone or for sharing photos. A button needs to be used to select the object you are looking at otherwise you end up with the "Midas touch"(点石成金) effect, whereby everything you look at gets selected by your gaze, says Turner. "Imagine if your mouse clicked on everything it pointed at," he says. Christian Holz, a researcher in human-computer interaction at Yahoo Labs in Sunnyvale, California, says the system is a nice take on getting round this fundamental problem of using gaze-tracking to interact. "EyeDrop solves this in a slick (灵巧的)way by combining it with input on the touch devices we carry with us most of the time anyway and using touch input as a clutching mechanism," he says. "This now allows users to seamlessly(无缝地) interact across devices far and close in a very natural manner." 　　While current eye-trackers are rather bulky, mainstream consumer devices are not too far away. Swedish firm Tobii is developing gaze-tracking technology that can be installed in laptops and tablets and is expected to be available to buy next year. And the Google Glass headset is expected to include eye-tracking in the future. 　　Turner says he has also looked at how content can be cut and pasted or drag-and-dropped using a mix of gaze and taps on a touch screen. The system was presented at the Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia in Sweden, last week. The word “this” in Paragraph 6 refers to_______

A:application of gaze-tracking in human-computer interaction. B:interaction between human and computer. C:combination of gaze-tracking with input on touch devices. D:generalization of EyeDrop system.

第二篇 Eye-tracker Lots You Drag and Drop Files with a Glance Bored of using a mouse? Soon you’ll be able to change stuff on your computer screen – and then move it directly onto your smartphone or tablet(平板电脑) –with nothing more than a glance. A system called EyeDrop uses a head-mounted eye tracker that simultaneously records your field of view so it knows where you are looking on the screen. Gazing at an object – a photo, say – and then pressing a key, selects that object. It can then be moved from the screen to a tablet or smartphone just by glancing at the second device, as long as the two are connected wirelessly. "The beauty of using gaze to support this is that our eyes naturally focus on content that we want to acquire," says Jayson Turner, who developed the system with colleagues at Lancaster University, UK. Turner believes EyeDrop would be useful to transfer an interactive map or contact information from a public display to your smartphone or for sharing photos. A button needs to be used to select the object you are looking at otherwise you end up with the "Midas touch"(点石成金) effect, whereby everything you look at gets selected by your gaze, says Turner. "Imagine if your mouse clicked on everything it pointed at," he says. Christian Holz, a researcher in human-computer interaction at Yahoo Labs in Sunnyvale, California, says the system is a nice take on getting round this fundamental problem of using gaze-tracking to interact. "EyeDrop solves this in a slick (灵巧的)way by combining it with input on the touch devices we carry with us most of the time anyway and using touch input as a clutching mechanism," he says. "This now allows users to seamlessly(无缝地) interact across devices far and close in a very natural manner." While current eye-trackers are rather bulky, mainstream consumer devices are not too far away. Swedish firm Tobii is developing gaze-tracking technology that can be installed in laptops and tablets and is expected to be available to buy next year. And the Google Glass headset is expected to include eye-tracking in the future. Turner says he has also looked at how content can be cut and pasted or drag-and-dropped using a mix of gaze and taps on a touchscreen. The system was presented at the Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia in Sweden, last week. The word ―this in Paragraph 6 refers to __________ .

A:application of gaze-tracking in human-computer interaction. B:interaction between human and computer. C:combination of gaze-tracking with input on touch devices. D:generalization of EyeDrop system.

{{B}}第三篇{{/B}}

A:new radio devices should be developed for tracking the endangered blue whales B:blue whales are no longer endangered with the use of the new listening system C:opinions differ as to whether civilian scientists should be allowed to use military technology D:military technology bas great potential in civilian use