2020年高考英语外刊时事命题阅读理解：强烈自我怀疑 那是冒名顶替症候群在作怪

新高考英语时文阅读高三专版（含答案解析与原文翻译）AI was already a hand washer. And since the spread of coronavirus, it’s been kicked into overdrive. I don’t consider myself panicked about COVID-19, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned. I live in an enormous city, packed with people, including countless travelers, and I understand how easily a contagious virus spreads. And hand washing may help us to keep it like that. The hard part has to do with the duration. “Scrub your hands for 20 seconds,”the CDC website warns. “Need a timer? Hum the ‘Happy Birthday’song from beginning to end twice.”The turning point came with a slight, unconscious tweak on the lyrics. After a few days, I added three words to the routine: “And many more.”That’s the way we do “Happy Birthday”in my family. These days, of course, those habitual words have particular resonance. What I am doing, after all, when I add “and many more”is making a plea: Let us stay safe and alive. “Its meaning,”writes Rodriguez, “is something like I pray it may be so.”I am an adult, aware of random chance and uncertainty. I’ve come to recognize that insecurity, chaos even, is the way of the world. In the face of an epidemic stretching toward a pandemic, I have one eye on living as if there will be no exceptional disruptions, and the other on preparing for catastrophe. What I’m saying is that I do not generally rely on magical thinking.Now I am consciously singing “and many more”when I fulfill the CDC’s instructions about how to wash my hands. I offer it to you as well, this coping mechanism, this precaution, this projection of a happy ending, which is, of course, a whisper of faith, not in divine intervention (神的干预) but in our ability to care for one another and ourselves.1. What is the attitude of the author toward the COVID-19?A. Panic.B. Concerned.C. Happy.D. Pessimistic.2. How long does it take to sing the ‘Happy Birthday’song once?A. 10s.B. 20s.C. 30s.D. 40s.3. What is the meaning of the added “and many more”these days?A. The author wants to sing the song in a creative way.B. The author blesses herself happy birthday.C. The author is to pray to be safe and live well.D. The author is showing off her great voice.4. Which of the following can be used to describe the author?A. Being full of magical thinking.B. Being ignorant.C. Being insightful and optimistic.D. Being a good singer.【答案】BACC【解析】本文是一篇记叙文，作者介绍了自己独特的洗手方法，以及疫情期间的感想，并鼓励人们也采用同样的方式洗手。

第一篇主题：Childhood出处： The Economist体裁：说明文字数：465字用途：适合课外补充阅读，概要写作练习适用对象：高三学生（词汇量3500）【导读】本文探讨在美国以及其他国家，几代人之间的童年时期出现的一些变化和原因。

【新闻正文】The Generation Game“WHEN I WAS a kid, we were out and about all the time, playing with our friends, in and out of each other’s houses, sandwich in pocket, making our own entertainment. Our parents hardly saw us from morning to night. We didn’t have much stuff, but we came and went as we liked and had lots of adventures.” This is roughly what you will hear if you ask anyone over 30 about their childhood in a rich country. Today such children will spend most of their time indoors, often with adults rather than with siblings or friends, be supervised more closely, be driven everywhere rather than walk or cycle, take part in many more organized activities and, probably for several hours everyday, engage with a screen of some kind. All this is done with the best of intentions. Parents want to protect their offspring from traffic, crime and other hazards in what they see as a more dangerous world, and to give them every opportunity to flourish.And indeed in many ways children are better off than they were a generation or two ago. Child mortality rates even in rich countries are still dropping. Fewer kids suffer neglect or go hungry. They generally get more attention and support from their parents, and many governments are offering extra help to very young childrenfrom disadvantaged backgrounds. As adolescents, fewer become delinquents, take up smoking and drinking or become teenage parents. And more of themfinish secondary school and go on to higher education.Prosperous parents these days, especially in America, invest an unprecedented amount of time and money in their children to ensure that they will do at least as well as the parents themselves have done, and preferably better. Those endless rounds of extra tutoring, music lessons, sports sessions and educational visits, together with lively discussions at home about every subject under the sun, have proved highly effective at securing the good grades and social graces that will open the doors to top universities and well-paid jobs.Working-class parents in America, for their part, lack the wherewithal to engage in such intensive parenting. As a result, social divisions from one generation to the next are set to widen. Not so long ago the “American dream” held out the prospect that everyone however humble their background, could succeed if they tried hardenough. But a recent report by the World Bank showed that intergenerational social mobility (the chance that the next generation will end up in a different social class from the previous one) in the land of dreams is now among the lowest in all rich countries. And that is before many of the social effects of the new parentinggap have had time to show up yet.【参考词汇】roughly adv. 粗略地; 大体上, 大约delinquent /dɪˈlɪŋkwənt/ n. 流氓；行为不良的人preferably /ˈprefərəblɪ/ adv. 较好；宁可，宁愿；更适宜wherewithal /ˌhweəwiːˈðɔːl/ n. 必要的资金（或手段）intensive /ɪnˈtensɪv/ adj. 集中的；加强的；彻底的；强有力的【概要参考范文】Nowadays, parents intend to look after their children and protect them from danger so kids are told to stay indoors. But compared with previous generations, kids now are provided with a better environment by parents and the government. The rich spare no effort to support their offspring to have a bright future. Meanwhile, wage strata lack money and energy to raise children, which results in numerous social influences. （Words 68)【参考译文】代际游戏“在我小时候，我们一直都在外面，和朋友们一起玩，在每个人家里跑进跑出，口袋里放着三明治，自己找乐子。

Robots aid in coronavirus fight疫情推动机器人加速上岗。

Robots have certain advantages compared to humans: They are efficient, tireless, can be repaired when damaged and they never get sick. This last trait has made them the star during our fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. While hundreds of thousands of medical workers have fallen ill dealing with this highly infectious virus and a lot more are forced to stay at home for fear of getting the disease, this isn’t a problem for robots.This is why the COVID-19 outbreak is seen as the “tipping point” – noted The Independent science reporter Anthony Cuthbertson – for robotsto start to replace humans in certain jobs.In areas like hospitals and healthcare facilities, robots are used to perform high-risk tasks. In China, for example, a hotel in Hangzhou employed a robot named “Little Peanut” to deliver food to people under quarantine. In Spain, robots are about to be used to test people for the coronavirus. Ultraviolet-light-disinfection (紫外线消毒) robots are also being widely used to clean hospital corridors and wards (病房).“Hospitals around the world are waking up to autonomous disinfection,” Per Juul Nielsen, CEO of Denmark’s UVD Robots, a leading company manufacturing (制造) disinfection robots, told Forbes. “We can’t build these robots fast enough."In non-medical companies, robots are also replacing human employees since they don’t have the problem of social distancing and will never take sick leave. Walmart and Amazon, for example, where robots are already used in sorting, packing and shipping, are planning to increase the number of robots in their facilities. Fast-food chains like McDonald’s are not only delivering food with robots in some areas, but also looking to use them as cooks and servers.According to futurist Martin Ford, using more robots than human employees can prove to be rewarding for companies – even when the pandemic is over. “People will prefer to go to a place that has fewerworkers and more machines because they feel they can lower overall risk,” Ford told the BBC.But this sudden surge (激增) in robot demand doesn’t mean that they triumph over humans in every aspect. According to Bill Smart, a roboticist at Oregon State University, the human contact between doctors and patients is still important. Doctors comfort the patients and guide them through hard decisions while robots are only doing routine tasks, like cleaning and giving tests, just to free up doctors and nurses.It might be true that robots have certain advantages over humans, but they are still secondary to human interaction.（选自BBC）1. What is the text mainly about?A. The advantages of robots compared to humans.B. Different views toward applying robots to fight COVID-19.C. Why the COVID-19 outbreak has fueled robot demand.D. Whether robots will replace humans in certain areas one day.2. What has made robots desirable during the pandemic according to the text?A. They can be repaired when damaged.B. They test people for coronavirus more precisely.C. They never get tired and can replace doctors and nurses.D. They are not vulnerable to the coronavirus.3. What does Martin Ford think of the application of robots?A. Its benefits are appealing and lasting.B. Machines are less disturbing than humans.C. It poses a threat to human employment.D. There are some risks with the use of robots.4. What can be concluded from the last two paragraphs?A. The demand for robots is too great to meet.B. Doctors can make more accurate judgments than robots.C. Humans interactions are essential in some areas.D. Robots need updating to improve contact with humans.译文：与人类相比，机器人具有某些优势：它们高效，不倦，在受损时可以修复，并且永不生病。

2020年高考英语时事热点拓展阅读（十六）Passagel《科学美国人》：中学生作弊被神经网络捕获。

词数285 建议阅读时间4分钟The English-language version of Wikipedia hasalmost six million articles. And if you're a cheatingstudent, that's six million essays already written for you,footnotes and all. Except plagiarism isn't really aneffective tactic——just plug the text into a search engineand game over.But what about having a ghostwriter at a paper mill compose your final essay?"Standard plagiarism software cannot detect this kind of cheating."Stephan Lorenzen, a data analyst at the University of Copenhagen. In Denmark, where he's based, ghostwriting is a growing problem at high schools. So Lorenzen and his colleagues created a program called Ghostwriter that can detect the cheats.At its core is a neural network trained and tested on 130,000 real essays from 10,000 Danish students. After reading through tens of thousands of essays labeled as being written by the same author or not, the machine taught itself to tune into the characteristics that might tip off cheating. For example, did a student's essays share the same styles of punctuation? The same spelling mistakes? Were the abbreviations the same?By scrutinizing inconsistencies like those, Ghostwriter was able to pinpoint a cheated essay nearly 90 percent of the time. The team presented the results at the European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning.And there's one more aspect here that could help students. Your high school essayspresumably get better over time as you learn to write—and the machine can detect that. "The final idea is to detect students who are at risk because their development in writing style isn't as you'd expect."Teachers could thus give extra help to kids who really need it, while sniffing out the cheaters too.重点讲解：1.and all等等；甚至包括；He dropped his sausage on the pavement and someone's dog ate it, mustard and all.他把香肠丢在人行道上，不知是谁家的狗将香肠甚至连带芥末都吃个了精光。