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学术英语期末复习资料

Review Assignment

Unit 1

So the ‘self’/‘other’ distinction that’s axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought.
We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community.
Relationships inform self-understanding. Who I am depends on many ‘others’: my family, my friends, my culture, my work colleagues.
Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticise, or those who praise me.
Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting.
While Descartes didn’t single-handedly create the modern mind, he went a long way towards defining its contours.
He wanted to find a stable point of view from which to look on the world without relying on God-decreed wisdoms; a place from which he could discern the permanent structures beneath the changeable phenomena of nature.
The only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito – the fact that you are thinking. Other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic.
So they must have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent and contemplative whole.
If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it’s perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab.
The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it’s possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world.
A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes.
Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society.
the investigation often presumes that a collective of Cartesian subjects are the real focus of the enquiry, not selves that co-evolve with others over time.
They were the first to identify the so-called ‘bystander effect’, in which people seem to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around.
Darley and Latané suggested that this might come from a ‘diffusion of responsibility’, in which the obligation to react is diluted across a bigger group of people.
This numerical approach wipes away vital contextual information that might help to understand people’s real motives.
Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self – the relational, world-embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one?
Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you’d felt but had never articulated; or when you’d struggled to summarise your thoughts, but they crystallised in conversation with a friend.
By ‘looking through the screen of the other’s soul,’ he wrote, ‘I vivify my exterior.’
A grimmer example might be solitary confinement in prisons. The punishment was originally designed to encourage introspection: to turn the prisoner’s thoughts inward, to prompt her to reflect on her crimes, and to eventually help her return to society as a morally cleansed citizen.
Studies of such prisoners suggest that their sense of self dissolves if they are punished this way for long enough. Prisoners tend to suffer profound physical and psychological difficulties, such as confusion, anxiety, insomnia, feelings of inadequacy, and a distorted sense of time. Deprived of contact and interaction – the external perspective needed to consummate and sustain a coherent self-image – a person risks disappearing into non-existence.
The emerging fields of embodied and enactive cognition(具身认知和主动认知) have started to take dialogic models of the self more seriously.

II
solitary scaffold inscribe contour
purport wipe away axiomatic contextual

Nowadays, there are hundreds of insurance policies that _______ to provide cyber insurance coverage.
Even modest price competition can easily _______ a third or more of operating income if grocers use lower prices to win customers.
Oracle Mobile Cloud aims to provide a more _______ user experience, which enables chatbots to switch seamlessly between unstructured conversation and personalised, structured data exchange.
In a beautiful mid-19th century painting by Rosa Bonheur, it’s possible to see asymmetrical “mountains” in the _______ of her sheep’s hindquarters.
He looked pleased: a(n) _______ man, by the look of him, one who cherished his privacy.
Each step you take provides _______ which will enable you to build the essay a little further.
It is _______ that all the sites that are infected should be treated if there is to be any hope of cure.
The memoirs of these survivors are rarely _______ in the chroniclers’ sentimental journeys.

Key: 1. purport 2. wipe away 3. contextual 4. contour 5. solitary
6. scaffolding 7. axiomatic 8 inscribed

Unit 2

In April 1815, the biggest known eruption of the historical period blew apart the Tambora volcano1, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, 12,000km from the UK. What happened next testifies to the enormous reach of the biggest volcanic blasts.
titanic explosion hurled a cloud of ash to a height of more than 30km.
According to the lieutenant governor, Thomas Stamford (later Sir Stamford) Bingley Raffles, to whom volcanologists are indebted for his accounts of the eruption, the detonation was so loud that it was mistaken across Java for cannon fire, causing consternation among the British troops, which had ousted the Dutch and French forces just a few years earlier.
After five days of relative calm, the climactic phase of the eruption began with a colossal explosion that launched a towering column of ash to the edge of space.
For four or five days, utter blackness reigned across the island as the hurricane blasts of hot ash and scalding gas – known as pyroclastic3 flows – scoured the flanks of the volcano of everything and everyone, and drifts of ash metres thick entombed what few signs of life remained.
The top 500m of the volcano was gone, blasted into smithereens,and replaced by a 6km-wide maw from which steam spiralled skywards.
But the consequences were not confined to this Indonesian backwater.
Form a giant aerosol8 veil that enclosed the planet and acted as a block to incoming sunlight.
A dry, sulphurous fog draped itself across the landscape of eastern North America, causing temperatures to plunge and bringing unprecedented summer cold.
the unseasonal cold accompanied by incessant rains and – into the following winter – by unusually powerful storms.
The alleged cultural implications of this “volcano weather” for Europe are somewhat whimsical.
The brilliant, gas-charged sunsets have been declared by some to have provided the inspiration for some of J. M. W. Turner’s9 more flamboyant skies.
Such was the degree of breakdown of food supply that economic historian John Post has called the episode “the last, great subsistence crisis in the Western world”.
Is it even something we could feasibly prepare for?
At the same time, the a worldwide competition for food supplies, scarce as a consequence of the harvest failures, could drastically reduce the range of products available in the UK, interfere with supply and distribution, and bring about a collapse of the supermarkets’ ultra-sensitive, time-critical, stock-control systems, leaving their shelves increasingly depleted.
While the less well-off could be priced out of purchasing even staple foodstuffs, panic buying by those who can afford it could quickly empty the stores.
On top of this, harvest disruption in response to volcano weather might extend far beyond Europe, and might – in ensuing decades – be exacerbated by the consequence of rampant climate change.
In spite of our modern farming methods and distribution systems, the ramifications could be far more severe than we expect.
The Toba eruption13 that excavated the world’s largest volcanic crater in Sumatra, around 74,000 years ago, for example, injected hundreds of times more sulphur gases into the stratosphere than Tambora.
So, if a Tambora-scale scenario would be bad news, far worse could be lying in wait.
While we can’t stop the next Tambora, nor handle its potential impacts on the climate and the harvest, we can ensure that contingency plans are in place to keep everyone adequately fed until the sulphur veil dissipates and temperatures return to normal.
Hazarding a guess about when and where the next Tambora will explode is far from an exact science.
Looking back at previous episodes of dramatic climate warming provides us with plenty of robust evidence for a vigorous volcanic response, most notably as our world heated up rapidly at the end of the last Ice Age.
The reaction is most pronounced at ice-covered volcanoes, where melting reduces the weight acting on the volcanoes beneath, facilitating eruptions and even promoting the production of more magma.
The Tambora eruption reinforces the unofficial volcanological axiom: The longer the wait, the bigger the bang. That rule of thumb is borne out by the fact that fully half of the biggest eruptions since 1800 originated at volcanoes that had previously been dormant throughout history.
What we should be keeping a special watch on then, in order to prepare ourselves for the next arrival of Vulcan’s15 shock troops, are those seemingly innocuous volcanoes that have kept their heads down for centuries or even millennia.

Unit 3

Quarks would have remained a mere theory, a will-o-wisp whose existence was confidently postulated but never proven.
Similar themes proliferate throughout the popular view of physics.
Everyone knows Paul Dirac who conjectured the existence of the positron, but how many know Carl Anderson and his collaborator Seth Neddermeyer who actually found it?
Finally, even today, a schoolchild would likely know Einstein’s prediction of the bending of starlight by the gravitational field of a star, but Arthur Eddington’s verification of this fact would be little known.
I started mulling over this vivid gap between the public’s appreciation of theorists vs experimentalists on reading a post by physics professor Chad Orzel who, taking a cue from my post about famous American physicists, makes the cogent point that while American theorists lagged behind their European counterparts until the post-war years, they were almost equal to the Europeans even in the 1920s.
This gap in perception is especially startling given the singular importance of experiment in physics and all of science, a central paradigm that has been the centerpiece of the scientific method since Galileo (apocryphally) dropped iron balls from the leaning tower of Pisa.
Richard Feynman paid a sparkling tribute to the supremacy of experiment.
And he is said to have admonished the capable students working under his tutelage - nine of whom won Nobel Prizes - to not “let me catch anyone talking about the Universe”.
But we would never have known this if it weren’t for the experimentalists who devised increasingly ingenious experiments to measure the parameter.
It seems to me that there are at least two important reasons why the public, in spite of tacitly appreciating the all-important role of experiment in physics, fails to give experimentalists their due.
Nobody can fail to gasp in awe at an Einstein or Bohr who, working with a few facts and pencil and paper, divine grand operating principles for the cosmos in short order.
Yet this mundane work is an essential step toward the grand finale of hard factual discovery. (humdrum)
To be fair though, it’s hard not to admire theorists when many experimentalists, as ingenious as their contraptions are, “simply” validate things which the theorists have already said.
Eddington might have observed deflected starlight, but Einstein simply plucked it out of thin air based on what seemed like magical speculation.
Firstly however, it’s very important to realize that all the awe for Einstein which we rightly feel comes only after the fact, after a thousand increasingly demanding tests of general relativity have established the veracity of the theory beyond any doubt.
after a period of breathless ascendancy by its proponents, the public seems to increasingly realize the gaping chasm between theory and experiment which the string theoretical framework constantly displays.
If we want to improve the public visibility of experimentalists and place experimentalists in their rightful place in the pantheon of popular physics, the main initiative would have to come from experimentalists themselves.
There is no doubt that experimental physics has seen some amazing advances in the last two decades, so there's certainly no dearth of stories to tell.
For instance just last year the Nobel Prize in physics went to Serge Haroche and David Weinland who have achieved amazing feats in trapping ions and atoms and verifying some of the most bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics.
Experimenters and their journalist friends need to now pick up the baton and run with it.
They need to communicate to the public why ion traps are as engrossing as Lie groups, why even the most elegant mathematical edifice can crumble in the face of confounding experimental evidence.
II. Build your vocabulary
A contraption B ingenious C tacit D conjecture E mundane
F humdrum G veracity H admonish I delicacy J supremacy
K practitioner L tribute M proponent N curvature O postulate
P verify Q proliferate R manipulation S confound T ultimate
Nor can I ______ how far I strayed north or south from my course.
The renowned theoretical physicist has for years been a(n) ______ of real-life, NASA-led interstellar travel.
My children’s teeth never had to have all this ______ on them.
I would address you frankly and ______ you to go no more into such places.
Even people who ______ a creative God usually acknowledge that his existence shifts the big question rather than resolving it.
This video of one of his last, and most impressive, stunts was released as a(n) ______ of his memory.
We came up with a(n) ______ plan that would light a fire in the belly of the digital revolution.
He often receives inquiries from sellers eager to ______ that their items are authentic.
Quality can be found in the most ______ works of man – even within thee rusting gears of a motorcycle engine.
There were three main groups competing for ______ among them.
Despite the increase in recognition of autism spectrum disorders in Western countries, the real cause of the disease continues to ______ and confuse scientists.
Accordingly, it tends to face less criticism on the basis of ______ and more on its moral implications.
But to recognise that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ______ achievement of wisdom.
I anticipate no difficulty, though it requires some thought in ______.
Do you seriously think of becoming a(n) ______ of medicine?

Key: 1-5 DMAHO 6-10 LBPEJ 11-15 SGTRK

Unit 5

But the similarity between computers and brains isn’t just superficial: at their most fundamental levels, computers and brains process data in a similar binary fashion.
Whereas computers use zeros and ones to store and manipulate data, the neurons in our brains transmit information in binary, on/off spikes known as action potentials.
This basic similarity is what underlies the burgeoning field of computational neuroscience, which hopes to understand how neuronal networks give rise to processes like memory and facial recognition so that they might be replicated in intelligent machines.
AI may have solved the game of checkers, but this is a far cry from being able to simulate consciousness.
For 15 years, Markram and his team collected data from the neocortexes of rats’ brains with the hopes of integrating it into a 3D model.
Of course, this sample is infinitesimally small compared to the 100 billion neurons in a human brain.
Technologically, in terms of computers and techniques to acquire data, it will be possible to build a model of the human brain within 10 years.
“It’s really difficult to say how much detail is needed for consciousness to emerge,” said Markram. “I do believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon.”
But not only is that not the whole story, but the problem—the biggest unsolved problem that has tended to haunt philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and AI—is creativity.
The general consensus is that creativity is the ability to invent new analogies, to connect two things that are not obviously related.
We find creative solutions to a problem when it lingers at the back of our minds, not when it monopolizes attention by standing at the front.
We tend to think of emotions in discrete terms, like happy, sad, and angry, but they’re really much more subtle than that.
What is your emotion on the first really warm day in April or March when you go out and you don’t need a coat and you can smell the flowers blooming and there may be remnants of snow but you know it’s not going to snow anymore and there’s a certain springiness in the air, what do you feel?
Though there may not be an exact word to describe this nuanced emotion, the mind can recognize it and can connect two very different scenes that may have inspired the same emotion.
When you feel happy, your body feels a certain way, your mind notices, and the resonance between body and mind produces an emotion.
II Building your vocabulary
emergent monopolise simulate burgeoning infinitesimally underlie haunt
Although in both emotions sympathetic symptoms are present, different autonomic-somatic patterns ______ aggression and anxiety, respectively.
In addition, the results will closely ______ the process that occurs during real trading, in which traders frequently re-optimise their systems to bring them up-to-date with fundamental or technical changes in the trading market.
Unresolved issues often come back later to ______ us. Many of these challenges can be the result of early childhood experiences.
It’s very unlikely that the ______ field of nano-biotechnology will be reserved solely for medical uses.
In the absence of existing human “herd” immunity to this virus, only immunization provides a significant hope oof suppressing the long-term impact of this newly ______ virus.
Thus, virtually all her time and energy is ______ by the children.
The action of municipal, county, or state school boards or boards of education is small, ______ small in comparison with the number of district.

Key: 1. underlie 2. simulate 3. haunt 4. burgeoning 5. emergent
6. monopolise 7. infinitesimally
Unit 6

The coincidental evolution hypothesis suggests that virulence factors arose as a response to other selective pressures rather for virulence itself.
The discovery of microbes were intriguing but seemingly unimportant.
Microbes are everywhere, but we take their presence on phones, keyboards, and toilet seats as a sign of filth and squalor. They fill our bodies, helping us to digest our food and safeguard our health, but we view them as adversaries to be drugged and conquered.
In an epidemic, the number of people affected by the disease is larger than what is normally expected.
The fear of these infectious diseases has contaminated our entire culture, from our religious rites to Hollywood films such as Contagion or Outbreak.
A growing number of studies show that our anthropocentric view is sometimes unjustified as bacteria easily evolve outside the context of human disease.
Most living creatures are capable of adaptation when compelled to do so.
The main symptoms of respiratory disorders are apnea, chest pain, wheeze and cough, which can be productive of sputum.
The paradox of exercise is that while using a lot of energy it seems to generate more.
Rather than being disintegrated, the E.coli strain actually grows inside its would-be predator and eventually kills it from within.
Evolution is all about small probabilities manifesting through long timescale and large numbers - and microbes have both.
And so we tend to identify microbes with the disease-causing minority among them, the little buggers that trigger the tickling mist of a sneeze or the pustule on otherwise smooth skin.
This antagonism is understandable. Aside from those of us with access to microscopes, most people will never see microbes with their own eyes.
The coincidental evolution hypothesis helps to resolve these paradoxes.
Those that cause disease exist to reproduce at our expense, and we need new ways of resisting them.
This hypothesis does not apply to all infections, and is almost certainly irrelevant to viruses, which always need to reproduce in a host.
Why would bacteria harm the hosts that they depend on for survival? In some cases, the answer is obvious: they cause symptoms such as sneezing or coughing that help them to spread.
The virulent forms, which descend deeper into the respiratory tract, are actually less contagious.
Scientists have found antibiotic resistance genes in bacteria that have been frozen for 30,000 years, or isolated in million-year-old caves.
Likewise, many of the ‘virulence genes’ that help pathogens to cause disease have counterparts in marine microbes with no track record of infecting humans.
And some supposedly pathogenic bacteria were often common parts of the environment.
Evolution selected for just the right combination of traits to cause disease in humans.
We fear lions and tigers and bears; bacteria have to contend with phage viruses, nematode worms, and predatory amoebas
people have begun to accept that a lot of these opportunistic pathogens that people assumed were only in the environment transiently between human hosts are actually environmental bacteria that occasionally end up in humans.

Unit 7

The sophistication of our lives is in a large part bestowed by material wealth, we would quickly revert to animal behaviour without the stuff of our civilization: What makes us human is our clothes, our homes, our cities, our things, which we animate through our customs and language.
Iron and steel were the defining materials of the Victorian era, allowing engineers to give full rein to their dreams of creating suspension bridges, railways, steam engines and passenger liners.
The fundamental importance of materials is made clear from the naming of ages of civilisations – the stone, iron and bronze age – with each new era being brought about by a new material.
The 20th century is often hailed as the age of silicon, after the breakthrough in materials science that ushered in the silicon chip and the information revolution.
A kaleidoscope of other new materials also revolutionized modern living.
The development of aluminium alloys and nickel superalloys enabled us to fly cheaply and accelerated the collision of cultures.
Materials are often the key to new treatments used to repair our faculties or enhance our features.
Pretty much the whole of materials science is concerned with the microscopic worlds.
Textiles are one of the earliest synthetic materials.
In the 20th century we learnt how to make space suits from textiles strong enough to protect astronauts on the moon as well as solid textiles for artificial limbs called carbon fibre composites.
We know the sounds of the doors in our houses, and can distinguish between someone leaving or entering from the subtle differences in keys rattling and hinges creaking.
Carpet makes a room feel warmer but also changes the acoustic signature of the room. The clickity-clack of high heels and the party they pronounce are muted; the squeak of rubber tennis soles and the sport they anticipate are banished; the comforting solid thump of sensible shoes on their way to work is no longer proclaimed.
It is this diversity of material knowledge that I intend to capture in these columns.
The central idea behind materials science is that changes at invisibly small scales manifest themselves as changes in a material’s behaviour at the human scale.
It is this process that our ancestors stumbled upon to make bronze and steel, even though they did not have the microscopes to see what they were doing.
Nevertheless this gradual accumulation of knowledge got us to the 20th century before any real appreciation of the structure of materials was understood.
By eschewing material knowledge we cease to understand the world around us.
We wring our hands about climate change or urban sprawl without any recognition that our ignorance of materiality might be the cause.
We may assuage our conscience by hoping that they are recycled with some technology equal in sophistication to their fabrication techniques but they are not; most are disposed of in industrial blenders.
The ages of civilization are named after materials precisely because they transformed and shaped society.
In my view this practical ignorance is every bit as dangerous to a modern democracy as a lack of literacy. (illiterate, illiteracy, literate)
By swopping a material and industrial understanding of the world for one based on facts and information, we find ourselves uncivilized in a different way.