天津阅读 Rd018・2021_06 阅读理解

When starting college, most students enjoy a week’s stay on campus before classes actually begin. What should you do with that time? Below are several tips to ease (使熟悉) yourself into college life.

Participating in Campus Welcome Activities

Most universities host welcome events before the academic year officially begins, including freshmen orientations (迎新会), campus picnics, and entertainments like concerts.

Participating in such events is a great way to learn about school facilities and understand campus culture: What do students do for fun? What are their favorite classes? What is the history of your university? It can help you observe campus life outside the classroom.

Exploring Campus

Getting to know where essential campus resources are—such as the student advising center, psychological services, and the tutoring center—will make your first few weeks on campus a lot easier, because you won’t have to look for them while still getting used to your classes.

Take some time to check out the buildings where your classes will be held. This will prevent you from getting lost in the first few days of classes and familiarize you with how long it takes to get from place to place. If you’re worried about taking classes one after another in different buildings, a quick test run won’t hurt. That way, you will avoid potential time delays in getting to your classes.

Starting a Routine

Before getting too excited about all of the fun things you will be able to do during the week, remember that you do have a pretty big schedule change coming up. Starting classes means being in different places at different times, so it’s a great idea to start getting used to that routine right this week.

What helps you most is to schedule your sleep. Following the planned time will ensure you have enough sleep to get to those early classes and stay wide awake.

If you have other daily routines, such as exercising or talking on the phone with family, work those into your day-to-day life before classes start so that you get a better idea of how they fit in with your schedule.

When people ask me how I started writing, I find myself describing an urgent need that I felt to work with language. Having said that, I did not know for a long time what I was looking for. It was not until I followed this feeling to its source that I discovered I had a passion for writing. With some encouragement from my colleagues, I had one of my poems published. This bit of success, however, was the point where my problem began.

Back in 1978, I had to travel between three different campuses in the morning, teaching freshman composition. Afternoons I spent taking my daughter to her ballet and horse-riding lessons. I composed my lectures on the way, and that was all the thinking time I had. When I returned home, there was not enough of me left for writing after a full working day.

As a way out, I decided to get up two hours before my usual time. My alarm was set for 5:00 A.M. The first day I shut it off because I had placed it within arm’s reach. The second day I set two clocks, one on my night table, and one out in the hallway. I had to jump out of bed and run to silence it before my family was awoken. This was when my morning writing began.

Since that first morning in 1978, I have been following the habit to this day, not making or accepting any excuses for not writing. I wrote my poems in this manner for nearly ten years before my first book was published. When I decided to write a novel, I divided my two hours: the first for poetry, the second for fiction. Well or badly, I wrote at least two pages a day. This is how my novel, The Line of the Sun, was finished. If I had waited to have the time, I would still be waiting to write my novel.

What I got out of getting up in the dark to work is the feeling that I am in control. For many people, the initial sense of urgency to create easily dies away because it requires making the tough decision: taking the time to create, stealing it from yourself if it’s the only way.

In the fictional worlds of film and TV, artificial intelligence (AI) has been described as so advanced that it is indistinguishable from humans. But what if we’re actually getting closer to a world where AI is capable of thinking and feeling?

Tech company UneeQ is heading for its “digital humans”, which appear lifelike on the screen not only in terms of language, but also because of facial movements: raised eyebrows, a smile, even a nod. They look close to a human, but not quite.

What lies beneath UneeQ’s digital humans? Their 3D faces are modeled on actual human features. Speech recognition enables them to understand what a person is saying, and natural language processing is used to work out a response. Meanwhile, another AI company, Soul Machines, is taking a more biological approach, with a “digital brain”, that imitates aspects of the human brain to adjust the emotions “felt” and “expressed” by its “digital people”.

Shiwali Mohan, an AI scientist at the Palo Research Center, is skeptical of these digital beings. “They’re human-like in their looks and the way they sound, but that in itself is not being human,” she says. “Human qualities also involve how you think, how you approach problems, and how you break them down; and that takes a lot of algorithmic (算法) design. Designing for human-level intelligence is a different attempt than designing images that behave like humans.” She then continues, “If something looks like a human, we have high expectations of them, but they might behave differently in ways that humans just instinctively (直觉地) know how other humans react.”

Yet the demand is there, with UneeQ seeing high adoption of its digital employees across the financial, health care, and commercial sectors (行业). “Unless these sectors make their business models much more efficient digitally, they might be left behind,” says Chetan Dube, UneeQ’s CEO.

Some other companies are taking their digital beings a step further, enabling organizations and individuals to create digital humans themselves using free-access platforms they provide. “The biggest motivation for such platforms is to popularize AI,” Dube says.

Mohan is cautious about this approach, yet she supports the purpose behind these digital beings and is optimistic about where they are headed. “As we develop more advanced AI technology, we would then have to use new ways of communicating with that technology,” she says. “Hopefully, all of that is designed to support humans in their goals.”

Art is everywhere. Any public space has been carefully designed by an artistic mind to be both functional and beautiful. Why, then, is art still so widely considered to be “the easy subject” at school, insignificant to wider society, a waste of time and effort?

Art can connect culture with commercial products in a way that not many other things can; art generates money and holds significant emotional and cultural value within communities. When people attend a concert, they are paying for music, sure, maybe even hotel rooms, meals, and transport, but they also gain an incredible experience, a unique atmosphere and a memory that will go through the rest of their lives. People don’t just want material things anymore, they want to experience life—the arts are a perfect crossover (交选) between culture and commerce.

Furthermore, the arts can bring communities together, reducing loneliness and making people feel safer. Social bonds are created among individuals when they share their arts experiences through reflection and discussion, and their expression of common values through artworks in honour of events significant to a nation’s experience.

The arts clearly have a pretty positive impact on physical and psychological health. It is found that people who frequent cultural places or participate in artistic events are more likely to gain good health compared to those who do not; more engagement with the arts is linked to a higher level of people’s wellbeing. The Royal Society of Public Health discovered that music and art, when used in hospitals, help to improve the conditions of patients by reducing stress, anxiety and blood pressure.

Children who are involved with the arts make greater achievements in their education: those engaged with drama have greater literary ability while others taking part in musical practice exhibit greater skills in math and languages. Kids with preference for the arts have a greater chance of finding employment in the future. Participating in the arts is essential for child development; encouraging children to express themselves in constructive ways could help to form healthy emotional responses in later life.

Vital to human life, art is celebrated and used by nations across the world for various purposes. Life without art would be boring and dead still, for art is a part of what makes us human.