剑桥雅思系列真题是剑桥大学考试委员会外语考试部出版各类考试真题的唯一官方出版社出版的权威教材，书中包含最新的雅思全真试题资料，是各类雅思考生备考过程中必不可少的参考书。非常适合学生自学的习题解答和听力录音文本。
TEST 3 PASSAGE 1 参考译文：
Early Childhood Education
New Zealand’s National Party spokesman on education, Dr Lockwood Smith, recently visited the US and Britain. Here he reports on the findings of his trip and what they could mean for New Zealand’s education policy.
儿童早期教育
新西兰国家党教育发言人Lockwood Smith博士最近访问了美国和英国。下面是他撰写的一份报告，文中阐述了他此行的收获以及这些收获对新西兰教育政策的意义。
A
‘Education To Be More’ was published last August. It was the report of the New Zealand Government’s Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. The report argued for enhanced equity of access and better funding for childcare and early childhood education institutions. Unquestionably, that’s a real need; but since parents don’t normally send children to pre-schools until the age of three, are we missing out on the most important years of all?
A 《教育增进能力》是一份由新西兰政府儿童早期关怀和教育工作小组所作的报告，于去年8月出版。该报告呼吁促进机会均等、加强对儿童的关爱和对儿童早期教育机构的资助。毫无疑问，这的确是必要的。但是一般而言，家长直到孩子3岁时才把他们送到早期教育学校，这样一来，我们是不是错过了教育孩子的最佳时期?
B
A 13-year study of early childhood development at Harvard University has shown that, by the age of three, most children have the potential to understand about 1000 words — most of the language they will use in ordinary conversation for the rest of their lives.
B 哈佛大学进行了一项长达13年的儿童早期发展的研究，结果表明：到了3岁时，大多数孩子已经具备理解1000个单词的能力，这些词汇是他们在以后的一生中进行日常对话时会经常用到的。
Furthermore, research has shown that while every child is born with a natural curiosity, it can be suppressed dramatically during the second and third years of life. Researchers claim that the human personality is formed during the first two years of life, and during the first three years children learn the basic skills they will use in all their later learning both at home and at school. Once over the age of three, children continue to expand on existing knowledge of the world.
该研究还表明：尽管每个孩子都有与生俱来的好奇心，但是这种好奇心却可能在2岁到3岁时受到强烈的压抑。研究人员表示，人的个性是在出生后的两年中形成的，到了3岁的时候，孩子们已经掌握了将来在家庭和学校中会用到的基本技能。从3岁以后，孩子们就开始在已有知识的基础上继续拓展对世界的认识。
C
It is generally acknowledged that young people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds tend to do less well in our education system. That’s observed not just in New Zealand, but also in Australia, Britain and America. In an attempt to overcome that educational under-achievement, a nationwide programme called ‘Headstart’ was launched in the United States in 1965. A lot of money was poured into it. It took children into pre-school institutions at the age of three and was supposed to help the children of poorer families succeed in school.
C 人们一般认为，家庭社会地位和经济条件不太好的孩子往往在学校表现不佳。不仅新西兰有这种情况，澳大利亚、英国和美国也都有这种情况。为了改变这种状况，美国于1965年在全国开展了一项“先发优势”计划，并投人大量资金。按照该计划，孩子在3岁时被送进早期教育学校，以帮助家境不好的孩子在学校取得成功。
Despite substantial funding, results have been disappointing. It is thought that there are two explanations for this. First, the programme began too late. Many children who entered it at the age of three were already behind their peers in language and measurable intelligence. Second, the parents were not involved. At the end of each day, ‘Headstart’ children returned to the same disadvantaged home environment.
尽管投人了大量资金，结果却令人失望。这可能有两个原因。首先，该计划所定开始年龄太大，许多3岁时进入早教学校的孩子此时已经在语言和智力发育上落后于他们的同龄人了。其次，这些孩子的家长并没有参与进来。每天放学后，这些孩子又回到了不利于他们成长的家庭环境中。
D
As a result of the growing research evidence of the importance of the first three years of a child’s life and the disappointing results from ‘Headstart’, a pilot programme was launched in Missouri in the US that focused on parents as the child’s first teachers. The ‘Missouri’ programme was predicated on research showing that working with the family, rather than bypassing the parents, is the most effective way of helping children get off to the best possible start in life. The four-year pilot study included 380 families who were about to have their first child and who represented a cross-section of socio-economic status, age and family configurations. They included single-parent and two-parent families, families in which both parents worked, and families with either the mother or father at home.
D 由于越来越多的研究表明儿童3岁前的时间是非常重要的，而且“先发优势”计划的结果又令人失望，所以，美国密苏里州实施了一项试点项目，其核心就是把家长作为孩子的第一任老师。研究表明：与家长合作而不是绕过家长，是帮助孩子获得人生最佳起跑点的最有效方式。密苏里州的这个项目正是以这一研究成果为基础的。该项目为期4年，包含了380个即将迎来第一个孩子的家庭，涵盖了不同家庭经济状况、社会地位、年龄段和家庭构成，其中包括单亲家庭、双亲家庭、双职工家庭以及父母中有一方居家的家庭。
The programme involved trained parent — educators visiting the parents’ home and working with the parent, or parents, and the child. Information on child development, and guidance on things to look for and expect as the child grows were provided, plus guidance in fostering the child’s intellectual, language, social and motor-skill development. Periodic check-ups of the child’s educational and sensory development (hearing and vision) were made to detect possible handicaps that interfere with growth and development. Medical problems were referred to professionals.
该项目派出受过专业训练的教育学家进行家访，与家长和孩子共同合作。项目提供了孩子发展的相关知识，以及孩子成长过程中要注意的事项。此外，该项目还提供在促进孩子智力、语言、社会和运动技能等方面的指导，定期检查孩子教育和感官(听觉和视觉)能力的发展情况，以及时发现孩子在成长和发育过程中的障碍，其中涉及到的医疗问题则由专门的医生处理。
Parent-educators made personal visits to homes and monthly group meetings were held with other new parents to share experience and discuss topics of interest. Parent resource centres, located in school buildings, offered learning materials for families and facilitators for child care.
教育学家亲自进行家访，对家长进行培训，并每月召开集体会议与那些新做爸爸妈妈的家长分享经验，讨论他们关心的问题。位于校内的家长资源中心则为家长和资助者提供关爱孩子的学习资料。
E
At the age of three, the children who had been involved in the ‘Missouri’ programme were evaluated alongside a cross-section of children selected from the same range of socio-economic backgrounds and family situations, and also a random sample of children that age. The results were phenomenal. By the age of three, the children in the programme were significantly more advanced in language development than their peers, had made greater strides in problem solving and other intellectual skills, and were further along in social development. In fact, the average child on the programme was performing at the level of the top 15 to 20 per cent of their peers in such things as auditory comprehension, verbal ability and language ability.
E 当密苏里项目中的孩子3岁时，研究人员将这些孩子与来自相同经济状况、社会地位、家庭状况的孩子以及随机抽取的同龄的孩子放在一起，共同进行评估。结果是惊人的。到了3岁的时候，参与项目的孩子在语言发育方面已远远领先于他们的同龄人。他们解决问题的能力和其他的知识技能得到了更明显的提高，在社会交往方面也取得了很大的进步。事实上，在诸如听力理解、口头表达和语言能力方面，参与项目的孩子一般都处于同龄人中前15%-20%的位置。
Most important of all, the traditional measures of ‘risk’, such as parents’ age and education, or whether they were a single parent, bore little or no relationship to the measures of achievement and language development. Children in the programme performed equally well regardless of socio-economic disadvantages. Child abuse was virtually eliminated. The one factor that was found to affect the child’s development was family stress leading to a poor quality of parent-child interaction. That interaction was not necessarily bad in poorer families.
最重要的是，结果还表明传统意义上的一些不利因素，如家长的年龄和受教育程度、是否是单亲家庭等，与孩子所取得的进步大小和语言发育几乎没有任何关系。无论项目中的这些孩子所处的经济条件或社会条件如何不利，他们的表现都毫不逊色。虐待儿童的现象几乎完全消失了。人们发现惟一一个会影响孩子发展的因素就是由干家庭压力所导致的亲子交流质量不佳，而这种交流在较为贫困的家庭倒不一定差。
F
These research findings are exciting. There is growing evidence in New Zealand that children from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are arriving at school less well developed and that our school system tends to perpetuate that disadvantage. The initiative outlined above could break that cycle of disadvantage. The concept of working with parents in their homes, or at their place of work, contrasts quite markedly with the report of the Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. Their focus is on getting children and mothers access to childcare and institutionalized early childhood education. Education from the age of three to five is undoubtedly vital, but without a similar focus on parent education and on the vital importance of the first three years, some evidence indicates that it will not be enough to overcome educational inequity.
F 这些研究结果是令人激动的。在新西兰，有越来越多的例证表明家庭经济条件和社会背景不佳的孩子入学时的发育就不是很充分，但我们的教育体制却在延续这种劣势。而上述项目中创新的做法则可以打破这种恶性循环。与家长在家庭、单位中进行合作的理念与儿童早期关怀和教育工作小组的报告提出的观念形成了鲜明的对比。该小组所关注的是使母亲和孩子能得到儿童保育，并使早期教育制度化。3岁到5岁间的教育无疑是非常重要的，但某些实例表明：如果不重视对家长的培训，不重视孩子3岁前的时间，那么这种教育将无法克服教育上的差距。
TEST 3 PASSAGE 2 参考译文：
Disappearing Delta
日益消失的三角洲
A The fertile land of the Nile delta is being eroded along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast at an astounding rate，in some parts estimated at 100 metres per year.In the past，land scoured away from the coastline by the currents of the Mediterranean Sea used to be replaced by sediment brought down to the delta by the River Nile，but this is no longer happening.
A 尼罗河三角洲在地中海沿岸的肥沃土地正以惊人的速度遭到侵蚀。在某些地段，估计侵蚀速度会达到100米/年。过去，由地中海洋流冲刷掉的沿岸土地会得到由尼罗河带到三角洲的土壤的补充，但是现在情况却发生了改变。
B Up to now, people have blamed this loss of delta land on the two large dams at Aswan in the south of Egypt，which hold back virtually all of the sediment that used to flow down the river. Before the dams were built，the Nile flowed freely carrying huge quantities of sediment north from Africa’s interior to be deposited on the Nile delta.This continued for 7,000 years，eventually covering a region of over 22,000 square kilometres with layers of fertile silt.Annual flooding brought in new, nutrient-rich soil to the delta region，replacing what had been washed away by the sea，and dispensing with the need for fertilizers in Egypt’s richest food-growing area.But when the Aswan dams were constructed in the 20th century to provide electricity and irrigation，and to protect the huge population centre of Cairo and its surrounding areas from annual flooding and drought，most of the sediment with its naturaI fertilizer accumulated up above the dam in the southern, upstream half of Lake Nasser, instead of passing down to the delta.
B 到目前为止，人们一直在指责埃及南部阿斯旺的两座大坝，认为它们造成了三角洲土地的流失，这两座大坝几乎将所有原来顺尼罗河直下的淤泥都阻挡住了。在建坝之前，尼罗河可以自由地流动，携带非洲北部内陆地区的大量泥沙、淤积到尼罗河三角洲地区，这种情况一直持续了 7000年，最终将这个22,000多平方公里的土地覆盖上了一层又一层肥沃的淤泥。每年的洪水泛滥都会给尼罗河三角洲地区带来新的富有营养的淤泥，补充那些被海水冲刷走的土壤。这样一来，尽管这个地区是埃及粮食产量最高的地区，却不需施加肥料。但是，到了 20世纪，人们建造了阿斯旺水坝来提供电力和进行灌溉，并保护开罗这个人口大城及其周边地区免遭洪水和干旱。自那时起，大多数淤泥连带其中的丰富养分都在大坝南部，Nasser湖的上游淤积起来，而没有被带入尼罗河三角洲。
C Now, however, there turns out to be more to the story.It appears that the sediment-free water emerging from the Aswan dams picks up silt and sand as it erodes the river bed and banks on the 800-kilometre trip to Cairo.Daniel Jean Stanley of the Smithsonian Institute noticed that water samples taken in Cairo，just before the river enters the delta，indicated that the river sometimes carries more than 850 grams of sediment per cubic metre of water — almost half of what it carried before the dams were built. ‘I’m ashamed to say that the significance of this didn’t strike me until after I had read 50 or 60 studies，’ says Stanley in Marine Geology.‘There is still a lot of sediment coming into the delta, but virtually no sediment comes out into the Mediterranean to replenish the coastline.So this sediment must be trapped on the delta itself.’
C 然而，现在看来，情况似乎不这么简单。从阿斯旺水坝流出的无沉淀物的河水在到达开罗前的800公里的路程当中，似乎在不断地侵蚀其流经的河床和河岸，泥沙含量在不断增加。Smithsonian学院的Daniel Jean Stanley注意到,从河水流人三角洲前的开罗河段中采集的水样表明，尼罗河携带的泥沙含量有时会多于850g/m3，差不多相当于建坝前的一半。Stanley在《海洋地质学》杂志上说：“说起来有些羞愧，我读了 50到60项研究才惊讶地发现这一重大情况，仍然有大量淤泥流入三角洲地区，但却几乎没有淤泥由此处流入地中海来补充海岸线，这就说明这些淤泥肯定淤积在了三角洲地区。”
D Once north of Cairo, most of the Nile water is diverted into more than 10,000 kilometres of irrigation canals and only a small proportion reaches the sea directly through the rivers in the delta.The water in the irrigation canals is still or very slow-moving and thus cannot carry sediment, Stanley explains. The sediment sinks to the bottom of the canals and then is added to fields by farmers or pumped with the water into the four large freshwater lagoons that are located near the outer edges of the delta.So very little of it actually reaches the coastline to replace what is being washed away by the Mediterranean currents.
D 从前在开罗北部，尼罗河水大部分被引入长达1,000公里的灌溉渠道，只有一小部分通过三角洲地区的河流直接汇入海洋。Stanley解释说，因为灌溉渠道中的河水是不流动的或流速很慢，所以不会携带泥沙。泥沙会沉积到灌溉渠的底部，然后由农民施加到田里，或者和河水一起被抽人三角洲外缘附近的四大淡水泻湖中。所以，事实上只有很小的一部分泥沙到达海岸线，补充被地中海洋流冲刷走的土壤。
E The farms on the delta plains and fishing and aquaculture in the lagoons account for much of Egypt’s food supply.But by the time the sediment has come to rest in the fields and lagoons it is laden with municipal, industrial and agricultural waste from the Cairo region, which is home to more than 40 million people.’Pollutants are building up faster and faster,’ says Stanley.
E 三角洲平原的农业和泻湖地区的渔业和水产养殖业为埃及提供了大部分食物。但当淤泥开始逐渐在田里和泻湖沉积的时候，淤泥中已经含有大量来自开罗这个人口超过4000万城市的工业和农业废弃物。Stanley说：“污染物增加的速度越来越快。”
Based on his investigations of sediment from the delta lagoons, Frederic Siegel of George Washington University concurs. ‘In Manzalah Lagoon, for example, the increase in mercury, lead, copper and zinc coincided with the building of the High Dam at Aswan, the availability of cheap electricity, and the development of major power-based industries,’ he says. Since that time the concentration of mercury has increased significantly. Lead from engines that use leaded fuels and from other industrial sources has also increased dramatically. These poisons can easily enter the food chain, affecting the productivity of fishing and farming. Another problem is that agricultural wastes include fertilizers which stimulate increases in plant growth in the lagoons and upset the ecology of the area, with serious effects on the fishing industry.
乔治华盛顿大学的Frederic Siegel根据自己对尼罗河三角洲地区泻湖沉积物的调查，对Stanley的说法表示赞同。他说：“以Manzalah泻湖为例，随着阿斯旺高坝的建设、廉价电力的使用和大型耗电工业的发展，湖中汞、铅、铜和锌的含量也增多了。”从那时起，汞的浓度便大幅上升。使用含铅燃料的发动机产生的铅和其他工业源产生的铅也大幅度增加。这些有害物质很容易就会进入到食物链中，从而影响渔业和农业的产量。另一个问题就是包括化肥(残留物)在内的农业废弃物会刺激泻湖中植物的迅速生长，扰乱该地区的生态平衡，进而对渔业产生严重的影响。
F According to Siegel, international environmental organisations are beginning to pay closer attention to the region, partly because of the problems of erosion and pollution of the Nile delta, but principally because they fear the impact this situation could have on the whole Mediterranean coastal ecosystem. But there are no easy solutions. In the immediate future, Stanley believes that one solution would be to make artificial floods to flush out the delta waterways, in the same way that natural floods did before the construction of the dams. He says, however, that in the long term an alternative process such as desalination may have to be used to increase the amount of water available. ‘In my view, Egypt must devise a way to have more water running through the river and the delta,’ says Stanley. Easier said than done in a desert region with a rapidly growing population.
F 据Siegel说，国际环保组织开始日益关注这一地区，一部分原因是因为侵蚀问题和尼罗河三角洲污染的问题，但主要原因还是他们害怕这种情况会影响到整个地中海沿岸的生态系统。可是对于这个问题并没有简单的解决方案。Stanley认为，在不远的将来，使用人工洪水，像建造大坝前自然洪水那样冲刷三角洲的水道可能会是一种解决方案。但是，他又说，从长远角度来看，可能需要采取其他的作法(如海水淡化)来增加可用水的数量。Stanley说：“我认为，埃及必须设计出一种方案，使更多的水流入尼罗河，流经三角洲地区。”在这样一个人口迅速增长的沙漠地区，做到这一点的确不是一件容易的事。
TEST 3 PASSAGE 3 参考译文：
The Return of Artificial Intelligence
It is becoming acceptable again to talk of computers performing human tasks such as problem-solving and pattern-recognition
人工智能的回归
谈论计算机执行人类才能执行的任务，如解决问题、模式识别，再一次成为受欢迎的话题。
A After years in the wilderness, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) seems poised to make a comeback. AI was big in the 1980s but vanished in the 1990s. It re-entered public consciousness with the release of AI, a movie about a robot boy. This has ignited public debate about AI, but the term is also being used once more within the computer industry. Researchers, executives and marketing people are now using the expression without irony or inverted commas. And it is not always hype. The term is being applied, with some justification, to products that depend on technology that was originally developed by AI researchers. Admittedly, the rehabilitation of the term has a long way to go, and some firms still prefer to avoid using it. But the fact that others are starting to use it again suggests that AI has moved on from being seen as an over-ambitious and under-achieving field of research.
A 在失宠数年之后，“人工智能”这个词好像在准备着东山再起。人工智能在20世纪80年代非常流行，但到了20世纪90年代却突然消声匿迹了。随着《人工智能》这部关于机器男孩的电影的上映，这个词又重新回到公众的意识之中。虽然这部电影引发了公众对于人工智能的辩论，但这个词还是在计算机领域再次被使用。研究人员、行政管理人员和营销人员使用这个词的时候不再带有嘲讽的意味，也不再加引号。关于这个词，也不再总是天花乱坠的宣传。现在，这个术语逐渐被合理地应用到某些产品中，而这些产品正是依托原来人工智能研究人员开发的技术。诚然，这个词的复活还有待时日，而且有些公司仍尽量避免使用它。但是其他人已经开始再次使用这个词汇，这表明人们渐渐地不再将人工智能看作是好高骛远、无所建数的研究的代名词。
B The field was launched, and the term ‘artificial intelligence’ coined, at a conference in 1956, by a group of researchers that included Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell, all of whom went on to become leading figures in the field. The expression provided an attractive but informative name for a research programme that encompassed such previously disparate fields as operations research, cybernetics, logic and computer science. The goal they shared was an attempt to capture or mimic human abilities using machines. That said, different groups of researchers attacked different problems, from speech recognition to chess playing, in different ways; AI unified the field in name only. But it was a term that captured the public imagination.
B 1956 年，一组包括 Marvin Minsky、John McCarthy、Herbert Simon 和Alan Newell 在内的研究人员在一次大会上创造了“人工智能”这一名词，并开创了这一研究领域。这几位研究人员后来都成了这一领域的领军人物，这个研究领域涵盖了先前几个毫不相关的领域，如工序研究、控制论、逻辑和计算机科学。而人工智能一词为这个研究领域起了一个吸引人而又有实质内涵的名字。这些研究的共同目标就是试图用机器来模拟或再现人类的能力。说到这，需要指出的是，不同的研究小组用不同的方法解决不同的问题，包栝从语音识别到下棋等众多方面，人工智能只是在名字上将这个领域统一了起来，但这个词却引发了公众的无限遐想。
C Most researchers agree that AI peaked around 1985. A public reared on science-fiction movies and excited by the growing power of computers had high expectations. For years, AI researchers had implied that a breakthrough was just around the corner. Marvin Minsky said in 1967 that within a generation the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ would be substantially solved. Prototypes of medical-diagnosis programs and speech recognition software appeared to be making progress. It proved to be a false dawn. Thinking computers and household robots failed to materialise, and a backlash ensued. ‘There was undue optimism in the early 1980s,’ says David Leake, a researcher at Indiana University. ‘Then when people realised these were hard problems, there was retrenchment. By the late 1980s, the term AI was being avoided by many researchers, who opted instead to align themselves with specific sub-disciplines such as neural networks, agent technology, case-based reasoning, and so on."
C 大多数研究人员都认为1985年是人工智能的鼎盛时期。由科幻电影培育起来的、对计算机日益增强的能力激动不已的公众，对人工智能抱着很高的期望。多年来，人工智能的研究人员一直暗示成功近在咫尺。1967年，Marvin Minsky曾说，建立人工智能的实质性问题在一代人的时间里就将得以解决。医疗诊断程序和语音识别软件的雏形似乎都在取得进展。但最终这一切却成了一场空欢喜。有思维能力的计算机和家庭机器人都没能问世，。印第安纳大学的研究员David Leake说：“20世纪80年代早期的人们是过于乐观了。此后人们意识到这些问题并不好解决，于是就纷纷退出。到了 20世纪80年代晚期，许多研究人员都避免使用人工智能这个词，转而称自己从事的是一些具体分支学科的研究，如神经网络、智能主体技术和个案推理等等。”
D Ironically, in some ways AI was a victim of its own success. Whenever an apparently mundane problem was solved, such as building a system that could land an aircraft unattended, the problem was deemed not to have been AI in the first place. ‘If it works, it can’t be AI,’ as Dr Leake characterises it. The effect of repeatedly moving the goal-posts in this way was that AI came to refer to ‘blue-sky’ research that was still years away from commercialisation. Researchers joked that AI stood for ‘almost implemented’. Meanwhile, the technologies that made it onto the market, such as speech recognition, language translation and decision-support software, were no longer regarded as AI. Yet all three once fell well within the umbrella of AI research.
D 颇具讽刺意义的是，在某些方面，人工智能反而成为自己成功的受害者。每当解决了一个现实世界中的问题，如建造了一个可以无人在场的飞机降落系统，人们都不会将此归功于人工智能。正如Leake博士所说：“起作用的肯定不是人工智能。”这种不断拔高研究目标所造成的后果使有关人工智能的研究成了一种纯理论的研究，要实现其商业化还要很多年的时间。研究人员打趣说人工智能就是“接近完成”的代名词。与此同时，将人工智能推向市场的许多技术，如语音识别、语言翻译和决策支持软件，已不再被认为是人工智能，然而这三项技术曾经一度是完全属于人工智能研究领域的。
E But the tide may now be turning, according to Dr Leake. HNC Software of San Diego, backed by a government agency, reckon that their new approach to artificial intelligence is the most powerful and promising approach ever discovered. HNC claim that their system, based on a cluster of 30 processors, could be used to spot camouflaged vehicles on a battlefield or extract a voice signal from a noisy background — tasks humans can do well, but computers cannot. ‘Whether or not their technology lives up to the claims made for it, the fact that HNC are emphasising the use of AI is itself an interesting development,’ says Dr Leake.
E 据Leake博士说，现在这种趋势可能要开始扭转了。圣地亚哥的HNC软件得到了某个政府机构的支持，这一软件的研究人员认为他们处理人工智能的新方法是迄今为止所发现的最有效、最具前景的方法。HNC称，他们这一由30个处理器支持的系统可以在战场上发现伪装的车辆或从嘈杂的环境中提取某一声音信号。这些任务原来都是人可以做到、但计算机做不到的。Leake博士说：“无论他们的技术能否达到他们所宣称的水准，HNC强调自己在使用人工智能技术本身就是一个颇有意思的进展。”
F Another factor that may boost the prospects for AI in the near future is that investors are now looking for firms using clever technology, rather than just a clever business model, to differentiate themselves. In particular, the problem of information overload, exacerbated by the growth of e-mail and the explosion in the number of web pages, means there are plenty of opportunities for new technologies to help filter and categorise information — classic AI problems. That may mean that more artificial intelligence companies will start to emerge to meet this challenge.
F 在不远的将来，还可能会有另外一个使人工智能前景更光辉灿烂的因素。为了突显自己的个性，投资者不再单纯地寻求一种精明的商业模式，转而寻求与利用智能技术的公司的合作。电子邮件和网页数量的激增加剧了信息超载问题，这一特别的问题意味着新技术在信息过滤和分类方面将大有可为，而这些其实都是人工智能要解决的典型的问题。这就意味着更多的人工智能公司会应运而生。
G The 1969 film, 2001:A Space Odyssey, featured an intelligent computer called HAL 9000. As well as understanding and speaking English, HAL could play chess and even learned to lipread. HAL thus encapsulated the optimism of the 1960s that intelligent computers would be widespread by 2001. But 2001 has been and gone, and there is still no sign of a HAL-like computer. Individual systems can play chess or transcribe speech, but a general theory of machine intelligence still remains elusive. It may be, however, that the comparison with HAL no longer seems quite so important, and AI can now be judged by what it can do, rather than by how well it matches up to a 30-year-old science-fiction film. ‘People are beginning to realise that there are impressive things that these systems can do.’ says Dr Leake hopefully.
G 1969年一部名为《2001太空漫游》的电影，主要描述了一个叫HAL 9000的智能计算机的故事。HAL除了能懂英语和说英语之外，还可以下棋甚至通过观察人的嘴唇动作来理解话意。因此HAL集中体现了 20世纪60年代的乐观情绪，认为到了 2001年，智能计算机将得到广泛应用。但2001年已成为过去，HAL那样的智能计算机仍然没有丝毫出现的迹象。单独的系统可以下棋或转换语音，但是仍然没有一套关于机器智能的宏观理论。或许，与HAL之间的比较已变得不那么重要，人工智能可以凭借自己的作为得到公正的评判，而无需与一个30多年前的科幻电影中的人工智能机器进行比照。Leake博士满怀希望地说：“人们开始意识到人工智能系统是可以做出许多出色的工作的。”