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1. The committee's report was criticized for being excessively ______, focusing on minor procedural details rather than the substantive issues at hand.

2. Not until the final dataset was analyzed ______ the profound implications of their discovery.

3. The philosopher’s argument, ______ on a series of unproven axioms, was ultimately unconvincing to the skeptical audience.

4. The government's ______ approach to the burgeoning crisis was met with public disapproval.

5. It is imperative that the research protocol ______ to the highest ethical standards without exception.

6. Despite its initial promise, the new economic policy proved to be a ______ for the country's developing industries.

7. The CEO's ______ confidence in the face of plummeting stock prices seemed detached from reality.

8. ______ for the historian's meticulous cross-referencing of archival documents, the forgery might never have been discovered.

9. Her arguments were so ______ that she could persuade even the most intransigent of her opponents.

10. The study aims to ______ the causal relationship between early childhood education and long-term socioeconomic outcomes.

11. Rarely ______ a scholar of such intellectual breadth and analytical depth.

12. The ______ of the two theories is not immediately apparent; a deeper analysis is required to see their complementary nature.

13. The foreign minister's statement was a masterpiece of diplomatic ______, appearing to concede a point while actually reinforcing her original position.

14. The theory, once hailed as revolutionary, has been largely ______ by subsequent empirical research.

15. The judge's ruling was based on a strict ______ of the statute, leaving no room for interpretation.

16. ______ a wealth of data, the research team was still unable to establish a definitive link.

17. His ______ lectures, while informative, often failed to engage students on a deeper level.

18. The nascent field of synthetic biology, ______ with immense potential, also presents profound ethical quandaries.

19. The political analyst's ______ commentary highlighted the long-term geopolitical shifts rather than short-term events.

20. The university's decision to divest from fossil fuels was presented as a moral ______, a necessary step toward aligning its investments with its values.

21. The official was accused of ______, having used his public office for personal enrichment.

22. He was a ______ reader, consuming books on everything from astrophysics to ancient history with equal voracity.

23. The legal team sought to ______ the contract, arguing that it was signed under duress.

24. The new biography attempts to ______ the long-held belief that the author was a recluse, presenting evidence of a rich social life.

25. The board meeting devolved into ______ recriminations, with each member blaming the others for the company's failures.

Bài đọc hiểu

The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence

A fundamental, and perhaps intractable, challenge in artificial intelligence is the so-called 'frame problem.' Coined by McCarthy and Hayes in 1969, it addresses the difficulty of representing the effects of an action without having to explicitly represent all the things that do *not* change. When a robot performs an action, such as picking up a book from a table, a vast number of facts about the world remain unaltered: the color of the walls, the location of the sun, the political situation in Brazil. A purely deductive, logic-based system would have to churn through this near-infinite list of 'non-effects' to update its model of the world, leading to a computational quagmire known as the combinatorial explosion. Philosopher Daniel Dennett famously illustrated this with a thought experiment about a robot, R1, designed to retrieve its spare battery. R1 correctly deduced that pulling a wagon with the battery on it would cause the wagon to move, but it failed to consider that a bomb was also on the wagon. A successor, R1-D1, was designed to consider all implications of its actions but became paralyzed, endlessly calculating irrelevant consequences (e.g., that pulling the wagon would not change the color of the walls). The challenge, therefore, is not merely one of logic, but of relevance. How can an artificial system be programmed to home in on what is relevant in a given context, a task humans perform almost instantaneously and unconsciously? This issue suggests that human-like cognition may not be reducible to a set of formal rules, but might instead rely on a more holistic, context-sensitive mechanism that current AI paradigms have yet to replicate.

1. What is the central difficulty identified in the passage as the 'frame problem'?

2. The term 'combinatorial explosion' refers to:

3. Daniel Dennett's thought experiment with the robots R1 and R1-D1 serves to illustrate that:

4. The author implies that human cognition differs from current AI paradigms primarily in its ability to:

5. The tone of the passage regarding the prospect of solving the frame problem could best be described as:

6. What does the passage suggest is the core of the problem of relevance?

Historiographical Shifts in Interpreting the Enlightenment

For much of the 20th century, the Enlightenment was portrayed in popular and academic historiography as a monolithic, uniformly progressive movement celebrating the universal triumph of reason over superstition. This narrative, often termed the 'High Enlightenment' perspective, centered on a pantheon of French *philosophes* and presented a linear progression towards modernity. However, recent scholarship has profoundly challenged this simplistic teleology. Historians now emphasize the multiplicity of 'Enlightenments,' pointing to distinct national and regional variations, such as the more pragmatic and empirical Scottish Enlightenment versus the radical, atheistic currents in the French one. Furthermore, this revisionist approach moves beyond a myopic focus on a small cadre of elite intellectuals. It seeks to recover the 'low' Enlightenment of Grub Street hacks and clandestine publishers, and acknowledges the crucial role of sociability—in salons, coffeehouses, and Masonic lodges—in disseminating new ideas. It also incorporates a more critical lens, acknowledging that the supposedly universal 'Rights of Man' were often predicated on the exclusion of women, non-Europeans, and the lower classes. Post-colonial critiques, in particular, have interrogated the legacy of Enlightenment universalism, arguing that its claims to objective reason were often a guise for cultural and intellectual hegemony, imposing a Eurocentric model of civilization on the rest of the world. Consequently, the contemporary understanding of the Enlightenment is far more nuanced, viewing it not as a golden age of untroubled reason but as a complex, contradictory, and contested field of ideas with a profoundly ambivalent legacy.

1. What is the primary purpose of the passage?

2. The traditional 'High Enlightenment' perspective is characterized in the passage as:

3. According to the passage, post-colonial critiques argue that Enlightenment universalism:

4. What does the author mean by the 'multiplicity of Enlightenments'?

5. The passage suggests that the contemporary view of the Enlightenment is one that:

6. The mention of 'salons, coffeehouses, and Masonic lodges' serves to emphasize the importance of:

7. The word 'ambivalent' in the final sentence most nearly means:

Ontological Questions in Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics is arguably the most successful scientific theory in history, with its predictions verified to an astonishing degree of precision. Yet, beneath this empirical success lies a profound conceptual abyss concerning the nature of reality itself. At its heart is the 'measurement problem': a quantum system, such as an electron, can exist in a 'superposition' of multiple states at once (e.g., in multiple locations) until a measurement is made, at which point its wave function 'collapses' into a single, definite state. The question of what this superposition *is*, and what constitutes a 'measurement' that forces this collapse, pushes physics into the domain of ontology—the philosophical study of being. The influential Copenhagen interpretation, championed by Niels Bohr, adopted a pragmatic, almost anti-realist stance. It posits that it is meaningless to ask what state a system is 'in' before measurement; the theory only describes the probabilistic outcomes of measurements. This instrumentalist view effectively sidesteps deep ontological questions. However, many physicists and philosophers have found this unsatisfactory, arguing that a fundamental theory of physics ought to provide a description of reality as it is, independent of observers. Alternative interpretations have thus been proposed. The Many-Worlds interpretation, for instance, suggests that the wave function never collapses; instead, at the moment of measurement, the universe splits into multiple branches, with each possible outcome realized in a separate world. This approach, while ontologically extravagant, preserves the determinism of the underlying mathematics. The ongoing debate underscores that at the frontiers of physics, the line between empirical science and metaphysical speculation becomes inescapably blurred.

1. What is the main subject of the passage?

2. The Copenhagen interpretation is characterized as being:

3. The passage contrasts the Copenhagen interpretation with alternatives that:

4. The 'measurement problem' refers to the conflict between:

5. Why do some physicists find the Copenhagen interpretation 'unsatisfactory'?

6. The author uses the phrase 'ontologically extravagant' to describe the Many-Worlds interpretation because it:

7. What is the main conclusion of the passage?

8. The statement that 'it is meaningless to ask what state a system is 'in' before measurement' is representative of which viewpoint?