-职称英语考试理工类B级新增文章及译文.doc

Real World Robots 1When Our Eyes Serve Our Stomach 2Musical Robot Companion Enhances Listener Experience 3Researchers Discover Why Humans Began Walking Upright 5Giant Structures 6Why India Needs Its Dying Vultures 8Better Solar Energy Systems: More Heat, More Light 9What Is a Dream? 10The Biology of Music 12The Apgar Test 13Ice Cream Taster Has Sweet Job 14Real World Robots 16Lightening Strikes 17Real World RobotsWhen you think of a robot, do you envision a shiny, metallic device having the same general shape as a human being, performing humanlike functions, and responding to your questions in a monotone voice accentuated by high-pitched tones and beeps? This is the way many of us imagine a robot, but in the real world, a robot is not humanoid at all. Instead a robot often is a voiceless, box-shaped machine that efficiently carries out repetitive or dangerous functions usually performed by humans. Today’s robot is more than an automatic machine that performs one task again and again. A modern robot is programmed with varying degrees of artificial intelligence—that is, a robot contains a computer program that tells it how to perform tasks associated with human intelligence, such as reasoning, drawing conclusions, and learning from past experience.A robot does not possess a human shape for the simple reason that a two-legged robot has great difficulty remaining balanced. A robot does, however, move from place to place on wheels and axles that roll and rotate. A robot even has limbs that swivel and move in combination with joints and motors. To find its way in its surroundings1, a robot utilizes various built-in sensors. Antennae attached to the robot’s base detect anything they bump into. If the robot starts to teeter as it moves on an incline, a gyroscope or a pendulum inside it senses the vertical differential. To determine its distance from an object and how quickly it will reach the object，the robot bounces beams of laser light and ultrasonic sound waves off obstructions in its path2. These and other sensors constantly feed information to the computer, which then analyzes the information and corrects or adjusts the robot’s actions. As science and technology advance, the robot too will progress in its functions and use of artificial-intelligence programs.当你想到机器人的时候，你脑海中浮现的是不是一种有着大体人类轮廓的、可以发挥像人类同样的功能，并且能用夹着高音的单调音调回答你的问题的有光泽的金属装置？诸多人想象中的机器人都是这个样子的，但是，在现实世界中，机器人和人类长得一点都不像。

与之相反，机器人一般是一种不会说话的盒子状机器，可以替代人类高效率地完毕某些反复性的或者危险的工作 目前的机器人不仅仅是一台可以反复同一任务的自动工具，而是具有不同限度的人工智能，也就是说，机器人内置了一种计算机程序，可以指引机器人完毕与人类智能有关的任务，例如推理、得出结论，以及从过去的经验中学习 机器人不具有人形的因素是，如果机器人有两条腿的话，保持平衡会很困难机器人的移动重要依托轮轴构造旋转来实现有的机器人甚至还可以通过接合点和发动机旋转和移动的臂机器人依托多种内置的感觉器来协助寻找途径连接在机器人底部的天线可以探测到机器人撞到的任何物体 在斜坡上移动的时候，如果机器人开始摇晃，机器人内部的陀螺仪和钟摆仪就会探测到水平方向的变化机器人探测自己与其她物体的距离以及达到该物体的时间的措施是发射激光束和超声波，通过反射的信号来判断这些信息 这些探测器不断地向计算机提供信息，计算机将这些信息进行分析，从而纠正或调节机器人的进一步动作随着科技的进步，机器人也会在功能和人工智能程序等方面上获得发展 When Our Eyes Serve Our StomachOur senses aren’t just delivering 汪 strict view of what’s going on in the world; they’re affected by what’s going on in our heads. A new study finds that hungry people see food-related words more clearly than people who’ve just eaten.Psychologists have known for decades that what’s going on,inside our head affects our senses. For example, poorer children think coins are larger than they are, and hungry people think pictures of food are brighter. Remi Radel of University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis，France，wanted to investigate how this happens. Does it happen right away as the brain receives signals from the eyes or a little later as the brain’s high-level thinking processes get involved.Radel recruited 42 students with a normal body mass index. On the day of his or her test, each student was told to arrive at the lab at noon after three or four hours of not eating. Then they were told there was a delay. Some were told to come back in 10 minutes; others were given an hour to get lunch first. So half the students were hungry when they did the experiment and the other half had just eaten.For the experiment, the participant looked at a computer screen. One by one, 80 words flashed on the screen for about l/300th of a second each. They flashed at so small a size that the students could only consciously perceive. A quarter of the words were food-related. After each word，each person was asked how bright the word was and asked to choose which of two words they’d seen — a food-related word like cake or a neutral word like boat. Each word appeared too briefly for the participant to really read it.Hungry people saw the food-related words as brighter and were better at identifying food- related words. Because the word appeared too quickly for them to be reliably seen, this means that the difference is in perception ,not in thinking processes, Radel says. “This is something great to me. Humans can really perceive what they need or what they strive for. From the experiment, I know that our brain can really be at the d。