桂林理工大学
Human memory is notoriously unreliable. Even people with the sharpest facial-recognition skills can only remember so much.It’s tough to quantify how good a person is at remembering. No one really knows how many different faces someone can recall, for example, but various estimates tend to hover in the thousands—based on the number of acquaintances a person might have.Machines aren’t limited this way. Give the right computer a massive database of faces, and it can process what it sees—then recognize a face it’s told to find—with remarkable speed and precision. This skill is what supports the enormous promise of facial-recognition software in the 21st century. It’s also what makes contemporary surveillance systems so scary.The thing is, machines still have limitations when it comes to facial recognition. And scientists are only just beginning to understand what those constraints are. To begin to figure out how computers are struggling, researchers at the University of Washington created a massive database of faces—they call it MegaFace—and tested a variety of facial-recognition algorithms (算法) as they scaled up in complexity. The idea was to test the machines on a database that included up to 1 million different images of nearly 700,000 different people—and not just a large database featuring a relatively small number of different faces, more consistent with what’s been used in other research.As the databases grew, machine accuracy dipped across the board. Algorithms that were right 95% of the time when they were dealing with a 13,000-image database, for example, were accurate about 70% of the time when confronted with 1 million images. That’s still pretty good, says one of the researchers, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman. “Much better than we expected,” she said.Machines also had difficulty adjusting for people who look a lot alike—either doppelgangers (长相极相似的人), whom the machine would have trouble identifying as two separate people, or the same person who appeared in different photos at different ages or in different lighting, whom the machine would incorrectly view as separate people.“Once we scale up, algorithms must be sensitive to tiny changes in identities and at the same time invariant to lighting, pose, age,” Kemelmacher-Shlizerman said.The trouble is, for many of the researchers who’d like to design systems to address these challenges, massive datasets for experimentation just don’t exist—at least, not in formats that are accessible to academic researchers. Training sets like the ones Google and Facebook have are private. There are no public databases that contain millions of faces. MegaFace’s creators say it’s the largest publicly available facial-recognition dataset out there.“An ultimate face recognition algorithm should perform with billions of people in a dataset,” the researchers wrote.11. Compared with human memory, machines can_____.12. Why did researchers create MegaFace?13. What does the passage say about machine accuracy?14. What is said to be a shortcoming-of facial-recognition machines?15. What is the difficulty confronting researchers of facial-recognition machines?
We all have offensive breath at one time or another. In most cases, offensive breath emanates from bacteria in the mouth, although there are other more causes.Until a few years ago, the most doctors could do was to counsel patients with bad breath about oral cleanliness. Now they are finding new ways to treat the usually curable condition.Bad breath can happen whenever the normal flow of saliva (唾液) slows. Our mouths are full of bacteria feeding on protein in bits of food and shed tissue. The bacteria emit evil smelling gases, the worst of which is hydrogen sulfide (硫化物).Mouth bacteria thrive in airless conditions. Oxygen rich saliva keeps their numbers down. When we sleep, for example, the saliva stream slows, and sulfur producing bacteria gain the upper hand, producing classic “morning breath”.Alcohol hunger, too much talking, breathing through the mouth during exercise anything that dries the mouth produces bad breath. So can stress, though it’s not understood why. Some people’s breath turns sour every time they go on a job interview.Saliva flow gradually slows with age, which explains why the elderly have more bad breath trouble than younger people do. Babies, however, who make plenty of saliva and whose mouths contain relatively few bacteria have characteristically sweet breath.For most of us, the simple, dry mouth variety of bad breath is easily cured. Eating or drinking starts saliva and sweeps away many of the bacteria. Breakfast often stops morning breath.Those with chronic dry mouth find that it helps to keep gum, hard candy, or a bottle of water or juice around. Brushing the teeth wipes out dry mouth bad breath because it clears away many of the offending bacteria. Surprisingly, one thing that rarely works is mouthwash. The liquid can mask bad breath odor with its own smell, but the effect lasts no more than an hour. Some mouthwashes claim to kill the bacteria responsible for bad breath. The trouble is, they don’t necessarily reach all offending germs. Most bacteria are well protected from mouthwash under thick layers of mucus (黏液). If the mouthwash contains alcohol—as most do—it can intensify the problem by drying out the mouth.6. The phrase “emanate from” in Paragraph 1 most probably means “_____”.7. Which of the following is mentioned as one of the causes of bad breath?8. According to the passage, alcohol has something to do with bad breath mainly because_____.9. Mouthwashes are not an effective cure for bad breath mainly because_____.10. We can infer from this passage that_____.
In the 1920s demand for American farm products fell, as European countries began to recover from World War I and instituted austerity (紧缩) programs to reduce their imports. The result was a sharp drop in farm prices. This period was more disastrous for farmers than earlier times had been, because farmers were no longer self-sufficient. They were paying for machinery, seed, and fertilizer, and they were also buying consumer goods. The prices of the items farmers bought remained constant, while prices they received for their products fell. These developments were made worse by the Great Depression, which began in 1929 and extended throughout the 1939s.In 1929, under President Herbert Hoover, the Federal Farm Board was organized. It established the principle of direct interference with supply and demand, and it represented the first national commitment to provide greater economic stability for farmers.President Hoover’s successor attached even more importance to this problem. One of the first measures proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he took office in 1933 was the Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was subsequently passed by Congress. This law gave the Secretary of Agriculture the power to reduce production through voluntary agreements with farmers who were paid to take their land out of use. A deliberate scarcity of farm products was planned in an effort to raise prices. This law was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on the grounds that general taxes were being collected to pay one special group of people. However, new laws were passed immediately that achieved the same result of resting soil and providing flood-control measures, but which were based on the principle of soil conservation. The Roosevelt Administration believed that rebuilding the nation’s soil was in the national interest and was not simply a plan to help farmers at the expense of other citizens. Later the government guaranteed loans to farmers so that they could buy farm machinery, hybrid (杂交) grain, and fertilizers.1. What brought about the decline in the demand for American farm products?2. The chief concern of the American government in the area of agriculture in the 1920s was_____.3. The Agricultural Adjustment Act encouraged American farmers to_____.4. The Supreme Court rejected the Agricultural Adjustment Act because it believed that the Act_____.5. It was claimed that the new laws passed during the Roosevelt Administration were aimed at_____.
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