9. New items, when first introduced, could be dismissed by some people who did not consider them useful.

10. A society’s way of life which requires physical work may depend in part on what and how much others consume.

We are excited to learn that all of our 5 drugs (approve) ________ by the agency.

Directions:This section is to test your ability to understand short conversations. There are 8 recorded conversations in it. After each conversation, there are some recorded questions. Both the conversations and questions will be spoken two times. When you hear a question, you should decide on the correct answer from the 4 choices marked A), B), C) and D) given below.Conversation 1（2019.6）

A) Heisawayonbusiness.
B) Heishavingameeting.
C)Heisvisitingaclient.
D) Heisonsickleave.

Conversation 1（2019.6）

A)Hisflighthasbeencancelled.
B)Hehastomeethislawyer.
C)Hewasinjuredinanaccident.
D)Heissufferingfromafever.

Conversation 1（2019.6）

A)Holdingatelephonemeetinginstead.
B)HavingitatthesametimenextMonday.
C) Askingtheir assistants to attend it.
D)Puttingitoffuntilnextmonth.

VR: A New Dimension in LearningA) I’m in a lecture hall listening to a cartoonish avatar (虚拟化身) of the American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explain the history of science. Just as he starts speaking about medieval beliefs in demons, a red devil appears out of nowhere. It rushes at my face showing its teeth, making me flinch. As Tyson moves on to Galileo and the experimental method, he creates a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of thin air, from which drop the two famous balls of different mass with exactly the same accelerations. This lecture hall is, of course, not real. I’m wearing a virtual reality (VR) headset, experiencing the virtual spaces created by Immersive VR Education.B) Immersive VR Education is a company based in a business park in the Republic of Ireland’s oldest city, Waterford. Tyson’s magic tricks are just a taste of VR’s potential to change how students learn, according to Dave Whelan, who quit his web design business to found the company in 2014 after putting on a headset for the first time. (“As soon as I put it on my face, I knew I wanted to work in VR,” he says.) Whelan imagines a world where aeronautics students assemble jet engines in VR, engineers build bridges around them using a kind of “virtual Meccano set” and chemistry lecturers take their classes inside models of molecules. “Why even teach in a classroom?” he asks. “If you’re teaching marine biology, teach that on the seabed and have a whale swim through the centre of the class. It’s a lot more engaging.”C) Whelan is just one of many people experimenting with the educative potential of VR now that the technology is widely accessible. High-quality headsets that can smoothly track head movements have come on to the consumer market in the past year. You would struggle to mistake the alternative worlds they create for real life just yet, but developers are already creating impressively detailed environments that look nearly as good as current computer games.D) At the top end, the headsets are not cheap, starting at £350 ($433) each and requiring a powerful computer, or a PlayStation 4, to run on. But despite the cost of equipping classrooms and lecture halls, education is predicted to become a sizeable part of the emerging VR market. A Goldman Sachs report released early last year predicted that there could be a $700 million (£550 million), 15 million-user market in schools and universities by 2025.E) Immersive VR Education is part of this push to extend the benefits of VR — which so far has been designed for gaming — into education. The application that hosts the Tyson lecture is called Engage, which is essentially a customisable (可定制的) space in which academics can call up 3-D models so that students can inspect them from every angle. In one demonstration, I assemble a human skeleton with one of Whelan’s colleagues. Although my partner is controlling his avatar from the next room, we can throw bones to each other before putting them together. Using the handheld controllers, I can pick up and examine the flattish bone that sits below the shoulder, turning it over and then slotting it into place. Even three weeks later, the memory of its shape is vivid (although I have forgotten what it is called). These virtual spaces “feel like real locations, and they’re making real memories”, says Whelan. It is easy enough for a medical student to examine a human skeleton without virtual reality, of course. But Whelan says that the next stage of the project is to create a far more detailed model of the human body that can be taken apart and reconstructed in VR. “That’s going to be useful for all medical institutes,” he says, adding that medicine is the “beachhead (据点，立足点)” for the use of VR in universities.F) The potential to use virtual reality when teaching students about anything physical and visual — bodies, molecules, archaeological digs and so on — seems clear. But there are also attempts to create historical experiences, loosely based on original sources, which raise a number of questions about if and how history should be taught in VR.G) Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel is one such project from the BBC. This takes the viewer back to the Dublin of 1916 to experience the uprising against British rule. The actual historical content is a narrative from Willie McNeive, who took part in the rebellion aged 19 and set down his memories on tape in the 1970s. The viewer hears McNeive’s recollections while being transported into increasingly perilous situations as the uprising unfolds. The world around the viewer is not designed to appear realistic, and is instead created as though painted with thick, flickering brush strokes. The effect is fascinating, but the memories it leaves you with are not those of McNeive’s voice — the genuine historical source — but of the parts of the experience that seem most interactive and exciting, like looking through broken glass windows at British troops, or hiding behind a street corner to avoid being shot.H) The company Immersive VR Education has also created an award-winning documentary (纪录片) that allows users to experience the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The experience is a mixture of the historical (it opens with footage of John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 speech vowing to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade), the hyper-realistic (at one point you sit alongside a lifelike Buzz Aldrin in a carefully recreated rocket cockpit) and the emotional, with music and the virtual effects. “It’s an inspirational piece, based on fact,” Whelan says. It has reportedly left some viewers in tears of emotion.I) But Whelan admits that the experience is so effective and powerful that it may be fixed in people’s memories as the “true” version of what happened on Apollo 11. More generally, with history in VR, “people might take stuff that they see in virtual reality as fact. It might affect their idea of history negatively,” he acknowledges. Much of the study of history is about living with a fragmentary (碎片的) and incomplete picture of the past. But the very nature of virtual reality — in common with recreations of history in films — is that gaps in knowledge get filled in as vividly as possible. Lecturers themselves, according to Whelan, should be honest about how much is actually known, and how much of the VR experience is an evidence-informed reconstruction. But whether a viewer’s memory would be able to go back over the VR experience and separate truth from guesses must be open to question.1. VR headsets are expensive, but education could potentially become a huge part of the VR market.

2. A history project creates a VR experience of the Irish rebellion against British rule, using voice of a rebel who took part, but a viewer recalls the interactive experience later.

3. Dave Whelan thinks that the promotion of using VR in universities can start from medicine.

4. The study of history in VR may raise a question as to whether a viewer can tell the difference between what is known and what is filled in with recreations.