2024 年 新高考二卷

1Choice of Walks for Beginner and Experienced Walkers

2The Carlow Autumn Walking Festival is a great opportunity for the beginner, experienced or advanced walker to enjoy the challenges of Carlow’s mountain hikes or the peace of its woodland walks.

3Walk 1 — The Natural World

4With environmentalist Éanna Lamhna as the guide, this walk promises to be an informative tour. Walkers are sure to learn lots about the habitats and natural world of the Blackstairs.

5Date and Time: Saturday, 1st October, at 09:00

6Start Point: Scratoes Bridge

7Walk Duration: 6 hours

8Walk 2 — Introduction to Hillwalking

9Emmanuel Chappard, an experienced guide, has a passion for making the great outdoors accessible to all. This mountain walk provides an insight into the skills required for hillwalking to ensure you get the most from future walking trips.

10Date and Time: Sunday, 2nd October, at 09:00

11Start Point: Deerpark Car Park

12Walk Duration: 5 hours

13Walk 3 — Moonlight Under the Stars

14Walking at night-time is a great way to step out of your comfort zone. Breathtaking views of the lowlands of Carlow can be enjoyed in the presence of welcoming guides from local walking clubs. A torch (手电筒) along with suitable clothing is essential for walking in the dark. Those who are dressed inappropriately will be refused permission to participate.

15Date and Time: Saturday, 1st October, at 18:30

16Start Point: The Town Hall

17Walk Duration: 3 hours

18Walk 4 — Photographic Walk in Kilbrannish Forest

19This informative walk led by Richard Smyth introduces you to the basic principles of photography in the wild. Bring along your camera and enjoy the wonderful views along this well-surfaced forest path.

20Date and Time: Sunday, 2nd October, at 11:45

21Start Point: Kilbrannish Forest Recreation Area

22Walk Duration: 1.5 hours

1Do you ever get to the train station and realize you forgot to bring something to read? Yes, we all have our phones, but many of us still like to go old school and read something printed.

2Well, there’s a kiosk (小亭) for that. In the San Francisco Bay Area, at least.

3“You enter the fare gates (检票口) and you’ll see a kiosk that is lit up and it tells you can get a one-minute, a three-minute, or a five-minute story,” says Alicia Trost, the chief communications officer for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit — known as BART. “You choose which length you want and it gives you a receipt-like short story.”

4It’s that simple. Riders have printed nearly 20,000 short stories and poems since the program was launched last March. Some are classic short stories, and some are new original works.

5Trost also wants to introduce local writers to local riders. “We wanted to do something where we do a call to artists in the Bay Area to submit stories for a contest,” Trost says. “And as of right now, we’ve received about 120 submissions. The winning stories would go into our kiosk and then you would be a published artist.”

6Ridership on transit (交通) systems across the country has been down the past half century, so could short stories save transit?

7Trost thinks so.

8“At the end of the day all transit agencies right now are doing everything they can to improve the rider experience. So I absolutely think we will get more riders just because of short stories,” she says.

9And you’ll never be without something to read.

1We all know fresh is best when it comes to food. However, most produce at the store went through weeks of travel and covered hundreds of miles before reaching the table. While farmer’s markets are a solid choice to reduce the journey, Babylon Micro-Farm (BMF) shortens it even more.

2BMF is an indoor garden system. It can be set up for a family. Additionally, it could serve a larger audience such as a hospital, restaurant or school. The innovative design requires little effort to achieve a reliable weekly supply of fresh greens.

3Specifically, it’s a farm that relies on new technology. By connecting through the Cloud, BMF is remotely monitored. Also, there is a convenient app that provides growing data in real time. Because the system is automated, it significantly reduces the amount of water needed to grow plants. Rather than watering rows of soil, the system provides just the right amount to each plant. After harvest, users simply replace the plants with a new pre-seeded pod (容器) to get the next growth cycle started.

4Moreover, having a system in the same building where it’s eaten means zero emissions (排放) from transporting plants from soil to salad. In addition, there’s no need for pesticides and other chemicals that pollute traditional farms and the surrounding environment.

5BMF employees live out sustainability in their everyday lives. About half of them walk or bike to work. Inside the office, they encourage recycling and waste reduction by limiting garbage cans and avoiding single-use plastic. “We are passionate about reducing waste, carbon and chemicals in our environment,” said a BMF employee.

1Given the astonishing potential of AI to transform our lives, we all need to take action to deal with our AI-powered future, and this is where AI by Design: A Plan for Living with Artificial Intelligence comes in. This absorbing new book by Catriona Campbell is a practical roadmap addressing the challenges posed by the forthcoming AI revolution (变革).

2In the wrong hands, such a book could prove as complicated to process as the computer code (代码) that powers AI but, thankfully, Campbell has more than two decades’ professional experience translating the heady into the understandable. She writes from the practical angle of a business person rather than as an academic, making for a guide which is highly accessible and informative and which, by the close, will make you feel almost as smart as AI.

3As we soon come to learn from AI by Design, AI is already super-smart and will become more capable, moving from the current generation of “narrow-AI” to Artificial General Intelligence. From there, Campbell says, will come Artificial Dominant Intelligence. This is why Campbell has set out to raise awareness of AI and its future now-several decades before these developments are expected to take place. She says it is essential that we keep control of artificial intelligence, or risk being sidelined and perhaps even worse.

4Campbell’s point is to wake up those responsible for AI-the technology companies and world leaders-so they are on the same page as all the experts currently developing it. She explains we are at a “tipping point” in history and must act now to prevent an extinction-level event for humanity. We need to consider how we want our future with Al to pan out. Such structured thinking, followed by global regulation, will enable us to achieve greatness rather than our downfall.

5AI will affect us all, and if you only read one book on the subject, this is it.