2019年12月英语四级真题 第1套

Section C
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.

Passage One
Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.

Professor Ashok Goel of Georgia Tech developed an artificially intelligent teaching assistant to help handle the enormous number of student questions in the online class, Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence. This online course is a core requirement of Georgia Tech's online Master of Science in Computer Science program. Professor Goel already had eight teaching assistants, but that wasn't enough to deal with the overwhelming number of daily questions from students.
Many students drop out of online courses because of the lack of teaching support. When students feel isolated or confused and reach out with questions that go unanswered, their motivation to continue begins to fade. Professor Goel decided to do something to remedy this situation and his solution was to create a virtual assistant named Jill Watson, which is based on the IBM Watson platform.
Goel and his team developed several versions of Jill Watson before releasing her to the online forums. At first, the virtual assistant wasn't too great. But Goel and his team sourced the online discussion forum to find all the 40,000 questions that had ever been asked since the class was launched. Then they began to feed Jill with the questions and answers. After some adjustment and sufficient time, Jill was able to answer the students' questions correctly 97% of the time. The virtual assistant became so advanced and realistic that the students didn't know she was a computer. The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were interacting with the virtual assistant and couldn't tell it apart from a real human being. Goel didn't inform them about Jill's true identity until April 26. The students were actually very positive about the experience.
The goal of Professor Goel's virtual assistant next year is to take over answering 40% of all the questions posed by students on the online forum. The name Jill Watson will, of course, change to something else next semester. Professor Goel has a much rosier outlook on the future of artificial intelligence than, say, Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak.

[46] 佐治亚理工学院的阿肖克·戈尔教授开发了一名人工智能的助教，以帮助处理“基于知识的人工智能”在线课程中学生们所提出的大量问题。该在线课程是佐治亚理工学院在线计算机科学硕士课程的核心课程。[47] 戈尔教授已经有8名助教了，但这还不足以应付学生们每天所提出的大量问题。
由于缺乏教学支持，许多学生退出了在线课程。当学生感到孤立无援或者十分困惑，加之他们所提出的问题也无人解答时，他们继续学习的动力就开始减弱。戈尔教授决定要采取一些措施来解决这种状况，他的解决方案是创建一个基于IBM 沃森平台的名为吉尔·沃森的虚拟助教。
在将吉尔·沃森发布到在线论坛上之前，戈尔和他的团队开发了几种不同的版本。起初，这位虚拟助教表现得不太出色。但是戈尔和他的团队在网上论坛上找到了自这门课程开设以来，学生们曾经问过的40,000个问题。然后他们开始将这些问题和答案灌输给吉尔。[48] 经过一些调整，并给予足够的时间之后，吉尔能够在97%的时间里正确回答学生们的问题。[49] 这名虚拟助教变得如此高级，如此逼真，以至于学生们都不知道她是一台计算机。正在学习人工智能的学生们与虚拟助教进行互动时，他们无法将其与真正的人类区别开来。直到4月26日，戈尔才将吉尔的真实身份告诉他们。事实上，学生们对这种体验持非常积极的态度。
[50] 戈尔教授的虚拟助教明年的目标是负责解答学生们在在线论坛上提出的所有问题的40%。当然，下学期，吉尔·沃森这个名字将改为其他名称。与埃隆·马斯克、史蒂芬·霍金、比尔·盖茨或史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克等人相比，戈尔教授对人工智能未来的前景有着更为乐观的看法。

Passage Two
Questions 51 to 55 are based on the following passage.

Thinking small, being engaging, and having a sense of humor don't hurt. Those are a few of the traits of successful science crowdfunding efforts that emerge from a recent study that examined nearly 400 campaigns. But having a large network and some promotional skills may be more crucial.
Crowdfunding, raising money for a project through online appeals, has taken off in recent years for everything from making movies to producing water-saving gadgets. Scientists have tried to tap Internet donors, too, with mixed success. Some raised more than twice their goals, but others have fallen short of reaching even modest targets.
To determine what separates science crowdfunding triumphs from failures, a team led by science communications scholar Mike Schäfer of the University of Zurich examined the content of the webpages for 371 recent campaigns.
Four traits stood out for those that achieved their goals, the researchers report in Public Understanding of Science. For one, they use a crowdfunding platform that specializes in raising money for science, and not just any kind of project. Although sites like Kickstarter take all comers, platforms such as Experiment.com and Petridish.org only present scientific projects. For another, they present the project with a funny video because good visuals and a sense of humor improved success. Most of them engage with potential donors, since projects that answered questions from interested donors fared better. And they target a small amount of money. The projects included in the study raised $4000 on average, with 30% receiving less than $1000. The more money a project sought, the lower the chance it reached its goal, the researchers found.
Other factors may also significantly influence a project's success, most notably, the size of a scientist's personal and professional networks, and how much a researcher promotes a project on their own. Those two factors are by far more critical than the content on the page. Crowdfunding can be part of researchers' efforts to reach the public, and people give because “they feel a connection to the person” who is doing the fundraising—not necessarily to the science.

从小处着眼，积极参与，有幽默感，这些都无伤大雅。它们都是最近一项针对近400个科学众筹活动的研究中发现的成功众筹活动所具备的一些特征。但拥有一个庞大的社交圈和一些推广技巧可能更为重要。
近年来，众筹活动（即通过网络渠道为一个项目筹集资金）蓬勃发展，而且众筹的产品无所不包，从制作电影到生产节水的小工具。[51] 科学家们也曾试图利用互联网上的捐助者，但结果却喜忧参半。有些科学家筹集到了自己目标两倍以上的资金，但有些科学家甚至没有达到本就不太高的目标。
[52] 为了确定是什么导致了科学众筹有的成功，有的失败，苏黎世大学科学传播学者迈克·舍弗领导的一个小组研究了371项近期众筹活动的网页内容。
研究人员在《公众理解科学》中报告称，实现了目标的科学家们具备四个显著特征。首先，他们使用的是一个专门为科学筹集资金的众筹平台，而不是适用于任何众筹的平台。尽管像Kickstarter这样的网站吸引了所有有望成功的众筹者，但Experiment.com和Petridish.org等平台仅展示科学项目。另外，他们用一段有趣的视频来展示自己的项目，良好的视觉效果和幽默感提高了成功率。[53] 他们中的大多数人都会与潜在的捐助者建立联系，因为那些回答了感兴趣的捐助者问题的项目进展得更好。[54] 而且他们的目标资金数额小。该研究包含的项目平均筹集了4000美元，其中30%的项目所筹到的资金少于1000美元。[54] 研究人员发现，一个项目寻求的资金越多，那么它实现目标的可能性就越低。
其他因素也可能会对项目的成功产生显著的影响，尤其是科学家的个人和职业社交圈的规模以及研究人员亲身推广项目的程度。到目前为止，这两个因素比网页上的内容更为关键。 众筹可以成为研究人员接触公众的努力的一部分，[55] 而人们之所以做出捐赠是因为“他们觉得自己与正在筹款的人有联系”，而不一定与科学有关。