Module 1 课时跟踪练（一) Introduction & Reading - Pre-reading

　　Ⅰ.阅读理解

　　A

　　WASHINGTON - It starts out laying flat, like a sheet of paper. Then it springs up, almost lifelike, and folds into moveable parts much like Japanese paper origami (折纸) art. And then it crawls away.

　　This new kind of robot could someday be used in space exploration, to slide into collapsed building sites to aid search and rescue, or to speed up production on assembly lines, experts said Thursday.

　　While this particular machine's march to the world market is still years away, the report in the journal Science said the latest advances open the way to a new frontier in personalized robotics.

　　Not only is the material cheap - it cost just $100 - it could be easily re­programmed from one task to another, said Sam Felton, a researcher at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

　　"In the same way that if you have a Word document and you want to change few words, you just reprint it at your home computer, you could take a robot's digital plan, change a few things and reprint it，" Felton told reporters.

　　The thin robot is built of layers, including paper, a middle layer of copper into a network of electrical leads，and an outer layer of shape­memory polymer (聚合物) that folds when heated. Once the batteries and motor are activated (激活), the robot folds itself much like a child's Transformer toy, and moves away like a crab.

　　Other potential uses could include self­assembling furniture，or even shelters that build themselves in disaster zones. "The exciting thing here is that you create this device that has computation (估算) put in the flat, printed version，" explained Daniela Rus, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "And when these devices lift up from the ground into the third dimension (维度), they do it in a thoughtful way."

　　语篇解读：本文是新闻报道。一款可以自动折叠的机器人可以广泛应用于太空探索和自然灾害的搜救等。

　　1．The author introduces the topic of the text by ________.

A．giving a description　　 　B．making a comparison