Đề Thi Chính Thức Môn Tiếng Anh THPT Quốc Gia 2022 - Đề 404

Imagine you are buying an apple in a supermarket. Which do you choose, one with a small brown mark, or one without? Be honest – you’d go for the apple which looks perfect. Supermarkets do this too, but on a much larger scale when buying fruit and vegetables from farmers. And what happens of the ones with marks on them? They are thrown away. So are the ones that are a funny shape or size. Another reason for waste is that people buy more food than they can eat and supermarkets do everything they can to encourage this, for example with offers like ‘Buy one, get one free’. Developed countries waste about 650 million tons of food each year and so do developing countries. However, the waste happens for very different reasons. As the world’s population grows, this problem will only worsen, so we need to take action urgently.

The concept of traffic-free shopping areas goes back a long time. During the Middle Ages, traffic-free shopping areas were built in Middle Eastern countries to allow people to shop in comfort and, more importantly, safety. As far back as 2000 years ago, road traffic was banned from central Rome during the day to allow for the free movement of pedestrians. The modern, traffic-free shopping street was born in Europe in the 1960s, when both city populations and car ownership increased rapidly. Dirty exhaust from cars and the risks involved in crossing the road were beginning to make shopping an unpleasant and dangerous experience. Many believed the time was right for experimenting with car-free streets, and shopping areas seemed the best place to start. At first, there was resistance from shopkeepers. They argued that people would avoid streets if they were unable to get to them in their cars. When the first streets in Europe were closed to traffic, there were even noisy demonstrations, as many shopkeepers predicted they would lose customers. With the arrival of the traffic-free shopping street, many shops, especially those selling things like clothes, food and smaller luxury items, prospered. Unfortunately, shops selling furniture and larger electrical appliances actually saw their sales drop. Many of these were forced to move elsewhere, away from the city centre.

Machines already perform a lot of tasks that were usually done by humans, such as building cars, doing complex calculations, and even marking exam papers. But now it seems that ever more intelligent machines are straying into areas where we never envisaged they would go. We have always taken pride in having a unique kind of intelligence that machines could never match, one which allows us to think of new ideas and produce creative and artistic works. But it seems that even here, computers are lining up to compete with us. Machines can easily be trained to do the physical work of producing art. About ten years ago, a painting robot known as e-David was created at a university in Germany. And recently in New York, the painting ‘Portrait of Edmond de Belamy’ has been auctioned for nearly half a million dollars. What made it a bit unusual was that the idea, and the image itself, was produced entirely by a computer. A group of young French artists gave instructions to the computer, aiming simply to show that computers can be creative. Some artists are now working with computers to produce a new kind of art. Computer-generated works of art are certainly interesting, and make us think about the limits of what machines can and cannot do. But not everyone would accept that they qualify as art. Some enthusiasts would argue they do, and the collectors willing to pay high prices for these works would suggest there is definitely a market for computer art. Others, however, would disagree. Many ‘real’ artists would claim that art is an expression of human intelligence and human emotions. More importantly, it is about a desire to communicate with other people. These things, they argue, are part of being human and can never be produced by a machine.