Oriole English Translation Center (OETC)

READING PASSAGE 2
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14-26, which are based on Reading
Passage 2 below:
ROBOTS
Since the dawn of human ingenuity, people have devised ever more cunning tools to
cope with work that is dangerous, boring, onerous, or just plain nasty. That
compulsion has culminated in robotics - the science of conferring various human
capabilities on machines.
A The modern world is increasingly populated by quasi-intelligent gizmos whose
presence we barely notice but whose creeping ubiquity has removed much human
drudgery. Our factories hum to the rhythm of robot assembly arms. Our banking is done
at automated teller terminals that thank us with rote politeness for the transaction. Our
subway trains are controlled by tireless robo- drivers. Our mine shafts are dug by
automated moles, and our nuclear accidents - such as those at Three Mile Island and
Chernobyl - are cleaned up by robotic muckers fit to withstand radiation.
Such is the scope of uses envisioned by Karel Capek, the Czech playwright who coined
the term ‘robot’ in 1920 (the word ‘robota’ means ‘forced labor’ in Czech). As progress
accelerates, the experimental becomes the exploitable at record pace.
B Other innovations promise to extend the abilities of human operators. Thanks to the
incessant miniaturisation of electronics and micromechanics, there are already robot
systems that can perform some kinds of brain and bone surgery
with submillimeter accuracy - far greater precision than highly skilled physicians can
achieve with their hands alone. At the same time, techniques of long-distance control will
keep people even farther from hazard. In 1994 a ten- foot-tall NASA robotic explorer
called Dante, with video-camera eyes and with spiderlike legs, scrambled over the
menacing rim of an Alaskan volcano while technicians 2,000 miles away in California
watched the scene by satellite and controlled Dante’s descent.
C But if robots are to reach the next stage of labour-saving utility, they will have to
operate with less human supervision and be able to make at least a few decisions for
themselves - goals that pose a formidable challenge. ‘While we know how to tell a robot
to handle a specific error,’ says one expert, ‘we can’t yet give a robot enough common
sense to reliably interact with a dynamic world.’ Indeed the quest for true artificial
intelligence (Al) has produced very mixed results. Despite a spasm of initial optimism in
the 1960s and 1970s, when it appeared that transistor circuits and microprocessors
might be able to perform in the same way as the human brain by the 21st century,
researchers lately have extended their forecasts by decades if not centuries.

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D What they found, in attempting to model thought, is that the human brain’s roughly
one hundred billion neurons are much more talented - and human perception far more
complicated - than previously imagined. They have built robots that can recognise the
misalignment of a machine panel by a fraction of a millimeter in a controlled factory
environment. But the human mind can glimpse a rapidly changing scene and
immediately disregard the 98 per cent that is irrelevant, instantaneously focusing on the
woodchuck at the side of a winding forest road or the single suspicious face in a
tumultuous crowd. The most advanced computer systems on Earth can’t approach that
kind of ability, and neuroscientists still don’t know quite how we do it.
E Nonetheless, as information theorists, neuroscientists, and computer experts pool their
talents, they are finding ways to get some lifelike intelligence from robots. One method
renounces the linear, logical structure of conventional electronic circuits in favour of the
messy, ad hoc arrangement of a real brain’s neurons. These ‘neural networks’ do not
have to be programmed. They can ‘teach’ themselves by a system of feedback signals that
reinforce electrical pathways that produced correct responses and, conversely, wipe out
connections that produced errors. Eventually the net wires itself into a system that can
pronounce certain words or distinguish certain shapes.
F In other areas researchers are struggling to fashion a more natural relationship
between people and robots in the expectation that some day machines will take on some
tasks now done by humans in, say, nursing homes. This is particularly important in
Japan, where the percentage of elderly citizens is rapidly increasing. So experiments at
the Science University of Tokyo have created a ‘face robot’ - a life-size, soft plastic model
of a female head with a video camera imbedded in the left eye - as a prototype. The
researchers’ goal is to create robots that people feel comfortable around. They are
concentrating on the face because they believe facial expressions are the most important
way to transfer emotional messages. We read those messages by interpreting
expressions to decide whether a person is happy, frightened, angry, or nervous. Thus the
Japanese robot is designed to detect emotions in the person it is ‘looking at’ by sensing
changes in the spatial arrangement of the person’s eyes, nose, eyebrows, and mouth. It
compares those configurations with a database of standard facial expressions and
guesses the emotion. The robot then uses an ensemble of tiny pressure pads to adjust its
plastic face into an appropriate emotional response.
G Other labs are taking a different approach, one that doesn’t try to mimic human
intelligence or emotions. Just as computer design has moved away from one central
mainframe in favour of myriad individual workstations - and single processors have been
replaced by arrays of smaller units that break a big problem into parts that are solved
simultaneously - many experts are now investigating whether swarms of semi-smart
robots can generate a collective intelligence that is greater than the sum of its parts.
That’s what beehives and ant colonies do, and several teams are betting that legions of
2

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mini-critters working together like an ant colony could be sent to explore the climate of
planets or to inspect pipes in dangerous industrial situations.

Questions 14-19
Reading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs A-G.
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
Write the appropriate numbers (i-x) in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet.
List of Headings
i Some success has resulted from observing how the brain
functions.
ii Are we expecting too much from one robot?
iii Scientists are examining the humanistic possibilities.
iv There are judgements that robots cannot make.
v Has the power of robots become too great?
vi Human skills have been heightened with the help of robotics.
vii There are some things we prefer the brain to control.
viii Robots have quietly infiltrated our lives.
ix Original predictions have been revised.
x Another approach meets the same result.
14 ________ Paragraph A

15 ________ Paragraph B

16 ________ Paragraph C

17 ________ Paragraph D

18 ________ Paragraph E

19 ________ Paragraph F
 20 ________ Paragraph G

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Questions 21-25
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2? In
boxes 20-24 on your answer sheet write
YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
20 __________        Karel Capek successfully predicted our current uses for robots.
21 __________        Lives were saved by the NASA robot, Dante.
22 __________        Robots are able to make fine visual judgements.
23 __________        The internal workings of the brain can be replicated by robots.
24 __________        The Japanese have the most advanced robot systems.

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