Advance in artificial intelligence (AI) are rapidly every aspect of human life. The world of AI is buzzing with an exciting potential to improve and enrich our lives. 1 . AI also has the potential hazard of 2 our experiences in ways we might find difficult to control. One such 3 is how we understand and experience beauty.
AI can be a collaborative tool in a wide range of creative endeavors. 4 the creation of human creativity and AI algorithms can lead to unique artistic 5 that are beautiful to the human eye. There collaborations are likely to become increasingly common.
6 , as convenient and provocative, AI can enable virtual try-on experiences where you can virtually 7 makeup, hairstyles, clothing, and even cosmetic procedure 8 you can make any physical changes. Individuals can now experiment with different looks and
9their preferences, potentially expanding the range of beauty ideals. AI algorithms can
10facial features and skin conditions to provide personalized beauty recommendations. This 11 approach aims to cater to individual preferences and enhance the concept of beauty tailored to each person’s unique characteristics. 12 , AI can be a fun vehicle for self-discovery.
While AI offers exciting possibilities, it also raises ethical 13 . There is a risk of deepening societal beauty 14 and perpetuating unattainable beauty standards 15 . AI-powered beauty filters and editing tools can lead to distorted self-perception and 16
body dissatisfaction. As summarized in a recent post “The Hidden Dangers of Online Beauty Filters”, 17 on this technology for social presentation can cause— 18 body image issues ,lower self-esteem, and social anxiety.
It is important to note that while AI can enhance our 19 of beauty, it should not
20 the genuine human experience and the emotional connections we derive from seeing the beauty in each other.

For thousands of years, donkeys have been critical for propelling human civilizations forward. They’ve helped pull wheeled vehicles, carry travelers and move goods across the world. But where and when these animals first became intertwined with humans has been a mystery. Now, researchers have used the genomes of over 200 donkeys to trace their domestication back to a single event around 7,000 years ago in East Africa—about 3,000 years before humans tamed horses. The team published their findings in the journal Science this month.
“Through their DNA, the animals are telling their history themselves,” co-author Samantha Brooks, an equine researcher at the University of Florida, says in a statement. “We usually only get the human’s side of history through written accounts, but of course written history does not always record exactly how something happened. Looking at these DNA sequences, we get a biological testimony to the environment these animals lived in and the experiences they survived.”
The researchers examined 207 genomes from modern donkeys living in 31 countries across the globe. They also looked at genomes from 15 wild equids and 31 earlier donkeys that lived between about 4,000 and 100 years ago. The team reconstructed the animals’ evolutionary tree and used computer models to pinpoint the domestication event, when herders in Kenya and the Horn of Africa tamed wild asses. They then traced how the animals spread across the rest of the continent and into Europe and Asia about 2,500 years later.
Though it’s still unclear why the original domestication happened, Science News’ Freda Kreier reports that the event coincided with the Sahara growing larger and drier. “Donkeys are champions when it comes to carrying stuff and are good at going through deserts,” co-author

Ludovic Orlando, an evolutionary biologist at Paul Sabatier University in France, tells the publication. Prehistoric humans may have enlisted donkeys’ help in navigating the expanding Sahara.
Researchers say these findings could help put donkeys in the spotlight. The animals could benefit from more research: Currently, there are no published genomes from donkeys located south of the equator in Africa. But understanding where the animals were first domesticated could guide archaeologists to a narrower region to search for insights about the original tamed donkeys.
Not only does understanding the equines’ genetic makeup help reveal their contributions to human history, but it also might improve their management in the future, as climate change alters the planet’s environment, write the authors.

There’s no business like show business—but in Los Angeles, it feels like there’s no business at all.
If that sounds melodramatic, consider this: The Art Directors Guild, a labor union representing about 3,000 film workers including set designers, art directors and many other artists, has suspended a training program and issued a statement explaining that “we cannot in good conscience encourage you to pursue our profession while so many of our members remain unemployed.” The guild’s pessimism is a reaction to Hollywood’s decline, which is reaching a critical point for the industry and Southern California.
Production has been slipping away from Hollywood since the 1950s, but the effects have never been more apparent than at present. Other regions in the United States, Canada and Europe have steadily increased incentives to attract TV shows and movies, leaving California in the dust. Georgia (which is where many Marvel TV shows and movies are shot) offers up to 30% in transferable tax credits on film and TV production costs, plus an additional 10% increase on the base tax credit if the project includes a Georgia promotional logo. Actors, directors and crew prefer to stay close to their homes in Los Angeles to film, but it’s hard for studios to pass up getting a third of their money back if they film outside of California.

Even as California lost a huge volume of production to other locations, there was still plenty of film production taking place in Los Angeles before this year—sufficient work that many people could make a living in the industry. We were kept afloat by “peak TV”, the glut of content that was required by the explosion of streaming services.
If productions in Southern California dip below a critical level for too long, the industry’s essential talent will drift away along with enormous sums of revenue. Persuading studios to film here would become much more challenging if we couldn’t offer a deep bench of local film workers, on-screen talent and local businesses that support the entertainment industry.
That’s why the California Film Commission and its Los Angeles counterpart, Film LA, now should act now, before it’s too late. These agencies and other government bodies should dramatically improve incentives to keep our current shows and attract new productions to Los Angeles. Let’s go on with the show…and make sure the show doesn’t go on without us.

The pioneers of wireless saw it as a gift to all the people. The BBC director-general Sir John Reith said that it would dispel “isolation of the spirit” and rejoiced: “It does not matter how many thousands may be listening, there is always enough for others … the genius and the fool, the wealthy and the poor listen simultaneously.”
Between two great wars this technological innovation built a new kind of national consciousness. Opening this week, a book and exhibition curated by Beatty Rubens at the Bodleian in Oxford records how radio changed everyday life from 1922 to 1939, as primitive crystal-and-wire devices evolved into sunburst-grille boxes. She draws on letters, diaries and fiction, and a 1939 field notebook of verbatim audience research by Winifred Gill. There’s fun in testimonies of people enjoying the sheer newness. A cartoon mocks a group failing to converse because they’re all in headphones. People report that broadcast music made workmen whistle new tunes.
By and large the wireless was welcome. I loved the chap from the Thirties research who found that wireless suddenly offered “a lot of variety… things I thought I’d never be interested in… ice hockey, perhaps”. True: for more than 80 pre-digital years, linear speech broadcasting brought the gift of serendipity, random enlivenings of a car journey or dull manual task. In my

own book about radio I recorded how, on one drive: “I caught up with the news, learnt some 17th-century history, and was startlingly educated by an unpretentious programme on the history of the stethoscope.”
But radio’s enriching serendipity is ebbing. With multiple networks, BBC Sounds and countless podcasts, a smartphone user selects what to hear and when. And while it is wonderful to take a walk with anything in your headphones, infinite choice encourages us to shrink into niche interests and sympathetic beliefs.
A hundred years on from Marconi and Reith, is the art of mere listening endangered? Some will say the audiobook boom revives it, though I suppose you can then worry about the decline of reading. But inventions shape all of us and it is worth noticing when techno-social habits do change, and asking whether to control them a bit or shield the youngest.
Whatever we do. Innovation will happen. Today we fret about the isolating culture of smartphone-staring and selfie-vanity, but already in 1939 there was that lady regretting how, when all her street got wireless, it lost the neighbourly habit of “talking on the brush handle”. It’s enough to make a person put down the smartphone and go out front with a yard broom.

When Tom Swetnam joined the U.S. Forest Service in the 1970s, his mandate was to “put everything out,” he recalled. But when Swetnam enrolled in graduate school at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, he was surprised to find a record of repeated blazes dating back hundreds of years before European colonists arrived on the continent. Some of the trees he analyzed bore more than 20 fire scars among their rings.
The fact that fires happened so often meant they couldn’t have been severe enough to kill most trees. Instead, a growing body of research showed that frequent, low-severity fires made many ecosystems healthier. They rid the forest of dead and sick trees, reducing competition and curbing the spread of disease. Because flammable material couldn’t build up on the landscape, blazes tended to move slowly and peter out when they reached the footprints of previous burns.
In 2022, Swetnam and other scientists teamed up to compile a database of fire-scarred

trees from across the continent. Their North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN) provided the basis for a study published last month. In the study, the researchers compared the historical fire cadence with the wildfires recorded over the past few decades, and uncovered a striking shortfall. The NAFSN sites experienced less than a quarter of the number of fires that would have been expected without fire suppression.
This deficit is a testament to the effectiveness of modern firefighting, said Kelly Martin, a past president of the International Association of Wildland Fire. “Yet the combined consequences of suppression and climate change have eroded humanity’s ability to suppress fires, particularly those that ignite under the most dangerous weather conditions.
To prevent entire ecosystems from going up in smoke, Martin said, people must bring healthy fire back to places that need it. At Yosemite National Park, Martin oversaw the use of what is known as prescribed burns to make the landscape more resilient. These fires were carefully planned and intentionally ignited during periods when weather kept the blazes easy to control, and helped eliminate some of the fuel that had build up around the important park’s facilities. Research shows that these prescribed burns make subsequent wildfires less severe, even if later fires happen under the most dangerous weather conditions.
Yet even as scientists and public officials increasingly agree on the need for more fires in our forests, climate change is making this tactic more challenging, experts said. “It’s a double-edged sword because wildfires are getting more severe and larger under climate change and we need this work even more, but then the work gets more challenging, ” said Susan Prichard, a fire ecologist at the University of Washington.

The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent text by choosing from the list A-H and filling them into the numbered boxes. Paragraphs A, C and H have been correctly placed. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)

[A]And just read a single poem. In his Oxford lectures, Seamus Heaney argued that a poem draws a picture of reality, a “glimpsed alternative” that sets up a contradiction with your own, in ways little and large. The negotiation, between you and it, is the heart of the matter. What does the poet see that you don’t? What does the difference mean? It could be one of the best conversations you ever have. Forget self-help books; reading is self-help in action.
[B]But for the most part, this isn’t what the business community does. I have yet to meet a chief executive who reads regularly. Many skip newspapers, and magazines are a stretch. They don’t have time, they say. It’s inefficient; they can get the information they need from those around them. At a pinch, they might pick up a business book before a long flight, in the hope that, like a cookbook, it will provide a foolproof recipe. Some are drawn to what I think of as “business car crash” books – the stories of Theranos, Purdue, or WeWork. But outside those narrow pools of interest, a vast ocean awaits, bountiful with simmering ideas, mental adventure and imaginative refreshment.
[C]Neuroscientists have been at pains to demonstrate that the pleasure a book provides isn’t indulgence; it’s good for you. Reading will keep you better informed about the world but it can also improve our tech-shattered ability to concentrate. Standing in the shoes of others fine tunes our social understanding, useful as we struggle to understand friends, neighbours, customers and co-workers. Different parts of our brain engage as we simulate scenes, characters and mental states. Our imagination – remember that? – is rekindled.
[D]It is undoubtedly true that all work and no play really does make Jack, or Jill, dull. The cure is right at hand, reading is cheap, easy and, most important, it’s fun. Liberate your imagination this year.
[E]We are living through a golden age of science writing. So lucid and accessible that even lay readers can relish the unpredictability of discovery. Daunted by uncertainty? Stand in the shoes of scientists and witness the degree to which breakthroughs emerge from accidents, conflict and sheer mental stamina. “We are never sure of anything,” says the physicist (and writer) Carlo Rovelli.
[F]You don’t need to get out more. If, like most business people, you spend your life dashing from office to plane, train to home, boardroom to washroom, what you really need to do is stay in more. Sit down – and read a book.
[G]Reading has also been found to make us more helpful, to reduce bias, and even to increase longevity – something we will enjoy all the more if we have a good book in our hands. (And yes, all these benefits are more closely associated with physical books than digital ones.)
[H]Read fiction. Any fiction. Free yourself from algorithms and choose anything you don’t need technology for an immersive experience just surrender to narratives across time and place. Modern (Sebastian Barry or Olga Tokarczuk), classic (Virginia Woolf or James Baldwin) or genre (Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Georges Simenon) – it doesn’t matter. Fiction invites you to loiter the unseen. In the lives of others. we are living through a golden age of translation too, so you can go anywhere in time or place.

F—>41[ ] —>42[ ] —>H —> 43[ ] —>C —>44[ ] —> 45[ ]

Read the following text carefully and then translate the underlined segments into Chinese.
Write your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)

Science education today revolves around the idea of scientific literacy—the base-level knowledge about science that nonscientists require to effectively get on in the world. This concept has served as a central goal for curriculum developers, local school boards, business and community leaders, and policymakers ever since its introduction nearly 80 years ago.
(46)Tracing the history of the term, we can see how the definition of scientific literacy has shifted over time, muddying the waters when it comes to determining the goals of science education.And that’s a shame, because there is much to recommend in the idea of scientific literacy as it was originally articulated in 1945, a time when science appeared to be the key to progress and scientists seemingly held the fate of the world in their hands. (47)A return to that version of scientific literacy, which focused more on teaching what science is and how it works and less on memorizing scientific facts, seems like something society today desperately needs.
In the United States, the desire to provide the public with a general, nontechnical education in science originated as far back as the late 1800s. (48)Educators advanced the idea of having students complete detailed laboratory exercises in high schools in the belief that such work was beneficial primarily as a way to enhance logical reasoning and observational skills.The development in 1915 of the popular new subject “general science” was another effort to train students to apply the principles of science to everyday, nonscience problems.
Although these efforts were aimed at the nonscience-bound student, they never really made their way into mainstream thought and public discourse as a means to rally widespread support for the importance of science teaching in schools. (49)It wasn’t until the phrase “scientific literacy” came along in the 1940s that science had the formidable slogan it needed to command public attention and make improving science education an important national goal.
(50)The intense focus on scientific literacy in the United States originally grew out of the critical role of science and technology during World War II, as well as the perceived deficiencies of American soldiers.As the war unfolded, science rapidly assumed a central role. Battles increasingly depended on new military technologies such as radar and the proximity fuze. Science-based analytical approaches proved remarkably successful in the hunt for German submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. And there was the (then-secret) work building the world’s first atomic bomb. As a result, scientists—physicists in particular—found themselves in high demand.