Adventure Works World Tours

    How often have you said out loud, “I would love to see the Eiffel Tower someday…” or “My dream in life is to see the pyramids”? Now you can stop talking about it and do it! Our mission is to provide you with the most comprehensive and complete planning and travel services so that you can have the adventure of a lifetime that is exciting, comfortable and worry-free.

    We have several packages to accommodate almost any need, or you can let us create a custom travel package. Following is a small sampling of some of our packages.

Egyptian nights

    Travel with us to the land of the pyramids, where you'll see ancient mysteries displayed before your eyes! Our specialists will share with you their extensive knowledge of Egyptian history and artifacts as you admire ancient wonders like the Sphinx and the pyramids at Giza.

    Packages range from 7 days and nights to 21 days and nights, and all packages include hotel, tours, and meals. Priced from $1,000 per person.

Splendors of Italy

    From the leaning tower at Pisa to the Vatican (梵蒂冈) in Rome, you'll see the greatest sights in Italy. You'll visit Florence, Rome, Pisa, and villages in the Italian countryside. You'll even get a primer (入门书) in the Italian language from a world-celebrated linguist (语言学家). Plus, you'll visit a cooking school for a lesson on how to make real Italian lasagna! Priced from $800 per person.

Russian experience

    Explore the best of Russia, a place of cultural and historical beauty. You'll tour Moscow and St. Petersburg and see for yourself places like Red Square, the Kremlin, Moscow University and more. Learn about the history and the people that make up this remarkable place. Priced from $1,500 per person (does not include airfare).

    Let us create just the right custom package for you! Let us show you the world!

Adventure Works

One Main Street, Seattle, WA 75006

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    It's 10:00 on a beautiful Sunday morning in California. To my left is some of the most beautiful coastline. I'm walking along a road ordinarily packed with cars on days like this, but today, thanks in part to my $135 entry fee, it is closed to traffic.

    There's only one problem: I should be running, not walking. Over the past year, I've spent hundreds of dollars on running gear(设备) and race entry fees. I've jogged than 1,600 miles training for this event.

    Dozens of runners pass me on either side, each of them experiencing varying degrees of sadness similar to my own. Most of them, like me, have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles to get here, spending $500, $1,000 or more to participate in this event.

    Actually I'm by no means a competitive athlete. My best finish ever was fourth place, in a 5-kftometer race with only 74 participants, many of whom were walking the entire course.

    Last year, over 500,000 runners completed a marathon in the U.S. alone. Nearly all of these runners had absolutely no chance of victory. The PR-personal record-is everyone's definition of a “good race,” whether he finishes in first or 301st.

    I should buy a new watch that not only tracks my location by GPS, but also by counting steps. This can more accurate and much more expensive. Finally, I have reached the finish line. I know that the official race photographers will be taking photos as I cross the line, so I raise my arms in “victory” I finish, in a time of 3:37:55, good for 354th place.

    A few days after the race, the race organizers email me a link to a site where I can preview my official photos 一 and download them, for a fee, of course.

    I wish I could say the feeling was unique; it's probably not Indeed probably a feeling most runners get in most marathons. Running a lot of marathons 9 in fact, may not even be good for your health.

    In America, marathoning is a rich person's sport.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    Written in the first chapter of the book Pride and Prejudice is an extraordinary sentence of which even a person who has had only a brief look upon the book will not fail to receive a deep impression — It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. In terms of Sherlock Holmes, we'd better alter the sentence into “It is a fact universally accepted by readers throughout the world that an excellent book in possession of our famous detective Sherlock Holmes is undoubtedly a masterpiece of all times.” Perhaps this is one of the most obvious explanations for the unrivaled popularity of “Holmes series” in the field of detective stories. Overwhelmed by the recommendations provided by my friends, I decided to take a look on this Sherlock Holmes and the Duke's Son originally published by Oxford University Press.

    As a whole, this book is about a case concerning the Duke's missing son. Arthur, the Duke's son, was found out in a certain morning to have disappeared, accompanied with which was also the disappearance of the German teacher. The school master Dr. Huxtable then turned to the famous detective of the time Sherlock Holmes for help. Realizing how tough and important the case is, Holmes immediately made up his mind to accept the case and followed Dr. Huxtable back to Mackleton by train. Having formed a rough idea about the whole matter, Holmes probed into the case immediately and had a careful investigation of the entire area shortly after the arrival, during the process of which he discovered the body of the German teacher Heidegger. Finally, primarily due to his prominent ability as a detective, he managed to unravel the mystery.

    Having once started reading this fiction, I was completely immersed in the mysterious story. At the beginning, unlike other detective stories, this story first delineates the client's strange behavior at length to indicate the severity of the incident in order to attract the readers to continue reading it. As is known to all, vivid depiction is essential to detective stories as it makes the story more authentic and attractive. Therefore, trying to present a “real world” to his readership, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the original “Holmes series”, has skillfully arranged the plots of the whole story from the perspective of Dr. Watson, a friend of Homes'. In this way, he elaborately (精心)depicted every scene and character in the book. Apart from the special start, the ending of the whole story, being dramatic but reasonable, is certainly an outstanding one. After all, except the author himself, who knows that the Duke's seemingly ordinary secretary is in fact the Duke's bastard(私生子)? In addition, who knows that the Duke actually has already been acquainted with the whole thing before Holmes solves this complicated problem? Yet, surprising as it is, this ending seems so natural that it fits all the plots of the story perfectly well. Closing my eyes, I can even “see” the story happening just like watching a film.

    As far as I am concerned, nothing is more admirable and surprising in the hero Sherlock Homes than his profound knowledge which has certainly assisted him a lot when he was studying the case. Take the bicycle tyres for instance, Holmes is capable of recognizing 42 different varieties of bicycle tyres. Except for his illimitable knowledge, Holmes also specializes in arranging the facts in order and then finding the fact leading him to a great discovery or even the truth itself. In this case, after getting rid of unrelated facts, Sherlock Homes eventually grasped the clue and discovered the amazing fact.

    Needless to say, as a world-renowned masterpiece, Sherlock Holmes and the Duke's Son has attracted and is still charming numerous readers from all corners of the world and people from all walks of life. The “Holmes series” has already set up a standard against which all the following detective fictions are measured. Sherlock Holmes, beyond all doubt, has been a name firmly rooted in people's memories. Although Dr. Watson's closing The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes in 1927 was a great pity to the readers, the discontinuance of the entire “Holmes series” may have actually added to the legendary stature of Sherlock Holmes.

A

My First Marathon（马拉松）

    A month before my first marathon, one of my ankles was injured and this meant not running for two weeks, leaving me only two weeks to train. Yet, I was determined to go ahead.

    I remember back to my 7th year in school. In my first P.E. class, the teacher required us to run laps and then hit a softball. I didn't do either well. He later informed me that I was ＂not athletic＂.

    The idea that I was ＂not athletic＂ stuck with me for years. When I started running in my 30s, I realized running was a battle against myself, not about competition or whether or not I was athletic. It was all about the battle against my own body and mind. A test of wills!

    The night before my marathon, I dreamt that I couldn't even find the finish line. I woke up sweating and nervous, but ready to prove something to myself.

    Shortly after crossing the start line, my shoe laces(鞋带) became untied. So I stopped to readjust. Not the start I wanted!

    At mile 3, I passed a sign: ＂GO FOR IT, RUNNERS!＂

    By mile 17, I became out of breath and the once injured ankle hurt badly. Despite the pain, I stayed the course walking a bit and then running again.

    By mile 21, I was starving!

    As I approached mile 23, I could see my wife waving a sign. She is my biggest fan. She never minded the alarm clock sounding at 4 a.m. or questioned my expenses on running.

    I was one of the final runners to finish. But I finished! And I got a medal. In fact, I got the same medal as the one that the guy who came in first place had.

    Determined to be myself, move forward, free of shame and worldly labels(世俗标签), I can now call myself a ＂marathon winner＂.

Hollywood's theory that machines with evil(邪恶) minds will drive armies of killer robots is just silly. The real problem relates to the possibility that artificial intelligence(AI) may become extremely good at achieving something other than what we really want. In 1960 a well-known mathematician Norbert Wiener, who founded the field of cybernetics（控制论）, put it this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot effectively interfere(干预), we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

A machine with a specific purpose has another quality, one that we usually associate with living things: a wish to preserve its own existence. For the machine, this quality is not in-born, nor is it something introduced by humans; it is a logical consequence of the simple fact that the machine cannot achieve its original purpose if it is dead. So if we send out a robot with the single instruction of fetching coffee, it will have a strong desire to secure success by disabling its own off switch or even killing anyone who might interfere with its task. If we are not careful, then, we could face a kind of global chess match against very determined, super intelligent machines whose objectives conflict with our own, with the real world as the chessboard.

The possibility of entering into and losing such a match should concentrate the minds of computer scientists. Some researchers argue that we can seal the machines inside a kind of firewall, using them to answer difficult questions but never allowing them to affect the real world. Unfortunately, that plan seems unlikely to work: we have yet to invent a firewall that is secure against ordinary humans, let alone super intelligent machines.

Solving the safety problem well enough to move forward in AI seems to be possible but not easy. There are probably decades in which to plan for the arrival of super intelligent machines. But the problem should not be dismissed out of hand, as it has been by some AI researchers. Some argue that humans and machines can coexist as long as they work in teams—yet that is not possible unless machines share the goals of humans. Others say we can just “switch them off” as if super intelligent machines are too stupid to think of that possibility. Still others think that super intelligent AI will never happen. On September 11, 1933, famous physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, with confidence, “Anyone who expects a source of power in the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.” However, on September 12, 1933, physicist Leo Szilard invented the neutron-induced(中子诱导) nuclear chain reaction.

    Allen Cook and his daughter Melissa were renovating(整修) her house, when they found a beautiful, heart-warming love story. "The envelope in the ceiling was old and yellow. It had never been opened, It was unbelievable when my son-in-low started reading it. In the letter she was talking about the baby she was going to have," Allen Cook said.

    The story began in May 4, 1945, the typed letter was written by a woman named Virginia to her husband, Rolf Christoffersen. At the time, he was a sailor in the Norwegian navy. The envelope was marked "return to sender" and never found its way to her husband. Allen's daughter used the Internet to find the phone number of someone named Rolf Christoffersen and gave him a call, leading her to his son in Santa Barbara, California.

    "Someone called me at my office. They just googled my name because I have the same name as my father. Melissa asked me where I grew up and I told her. She told me she had the letter," Christoffersen's son, 66 now, said. The younger Christoffersen wasn't yet born when his mother Virginia wrote the letter, but he said her words were very special to him. His mother, who died six years ago, wrote about her love for her husband.

    "I love you Rolf, as I love the warm sun, and that is what you are for my life, the sun about which everything else revolves around me," she wrote. Seventy-two years later, her words were finally heard by her husband. Christoffersen immediately called his father, who is now 96. And read the letter to him over the phone. "I was so surprised after all these years. I was very emotional," the elder Christoffersen said.

    The long-lost letter was finally received just before Mother's Day; it was another tangible connection to Virginia Christoffersen. "It's Mother's Day and reading her words reminded me just what a wonderful person she was and how much she loved us" her son said, through tears.