Work in pairs. Complete the sentences with the dependent preposition.

1 We are particularly interested … hearing from people who are fluent … both Spanish and English.

2 American English is significantly different … British English.

3 She was excited … the trip because she was going to learn to ski.

4 The company is proud … its environmental record.

5 Charles is fond … driving, so I’m happy just to be a passenger.

6 Naomi has been absent … class for four days.

7 I’m not responsible … breaking your computer.

8 The restaurant is famous … its seafood.

9 She is not very good … mathematics.

10 I’ve always been afraid … heights.

11 She’s never satisfied … what she’

             
 
Brain VS Supercomputer… Which one wins?                                                         

                                    

 
                       41 Which do you think is smarter? What interesting facts about your brain do you know?   5.4

 

 

Work in pairs. Complete the sentences with the numbers below.

Then read these amazing facts about our brain aloud.

   10   20      2  80 5 10 terabytes 100 billion 100 trillion

1 The human brain is only … of body’s weight but consumes … of oxygen and energy.

2 The brain operates on the same amount of power as a …-watt light bulb.

3 … of the brain is water.

4 Your brain grows quickest till the age of ….

5 The storage capacity of the brain is thought to be over … ; times more than

 Encyclopedia Britannica.

6 The human brain consists of … neurons and these are connected to well over …

 synapses.

43 Answer the questions.

1What does the brain work on?

2 When does the brain reach its full size?

3 Is our brain capable of forming new cells in adulthood?

4 Is the brain more active during the daytime or at night?

5 Can your brain feel any pain?

6 What speed do nerve impulses travel at?

Did you know?

A supercomputer was used to mimic brain but even with its 83 000 processors it could mimic

just 1% of one second of human activity and it took 40 minutes to do so.

 

44A Read the article and suggest the title. What do you understand by ‘intelligence’?                                                                

There's more to intelligence than processing speed. While a supercomputer like the Sequoia can analyze problems and reach a solution faster than humans, it can't adapt and learn the way humans can. Our brains are capable of analyzing new and unfamiliar situations in a way that computers can't. We can draw upon our past experiences and make inferences about the new situation. We can experiment with different approaches until we find the best way to move forward. Computers aren't capable of doing that -- you have to tell a computer what to do.

Humans are also very good at recognizing patterns. While we're making progress in machine pattern recognition, it's mostly on a superficial level. For example, some digital cameras can recognize specific faces and automatically tag photos of those people as you take pictures. But humans can recognize complex patterns and adapt to them -- computers still have trouble doing that.

Could computer scientists build a machine that simulates the way humans think? It's not as easy as it sounds. The human brain is incredibly complex. We still don't have a full understanding of how the brain works. Without this understanding, it's challenging to create a meaningful simulation of the brain.

One of the features computers would need to be more intelligent than humans is the ability to draw conclusions from observations. In a study published in 2009, computer engineers at Cornell University designed a program that could do this on a limited scale. The program gave the computer a basic set of tools it could use to observe and analyze the movements of a pendulum Using this foundation, the software was able to extrapolate basic laws of physics from the pendulum's motions. It took about a day for the computer to arrive at the same conclusions it took humans thousands of years to grasp.

While the Cornell project was a remarkable achievement in computer engineering, we're still years away from computers that can make conclusions from general observations. The Cornell software gave the computer the tools it needed to draw conclusions -- the computer was unable to create or refine these tools for itself.

As long as computers rely on sets of pre-installed instructions to perform tasks, they can't be said to be more intelligent than humans. Even IBM's Watson can only respond to input -- it can't spontaneously pull up information or think in the way we humans do. Only when computers can adapt and perform tasks outside their initial programming will they be truly intelligent. Until that time, computers are just very sophisticated calculator.

Hundreds of computer scientists are trying to solve this crucial problem. Some are attempting to design computers that can mimic human thought -- a tricky situation considering we still don't have a complete understanding of how we think. Other computer scientists prefer to design systems that don't use the brain as a model. Futurists like Dr. Ray Kurzweil predict that it's just a matter of time before we develop a computer system capable of being self-aware. After that, we may see computers capable of recursive self-improvement. That means computers will be able to analyze their own capabilities and make adjustments to improve performance.

But creating a self-aware computer system is beyond our capabilities right now. It may not even be possible. While we continue to gain understanding in the fields of biology and computer science, we may encounter a fundamental obstacle before we can ever create a self-aware machine. Alternatively, we may come to a point where human and machine intelligence merge, leaving the entire question moot

B Read the article again. Are statements 1-6 true (T) or false (F)?

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