In a former leather factory just off Euston Road in London, a hopeful firm is starting up. BenevolentAI’s main room is large and

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问题    In a former leather factory just off Euston Road in London, a hopeful firm is starting up. BenevolentAI’s main room is large and open-plan. In it, scientists and coders sit busily on benches, plying their various trades. The firm’s star, though, has a private, temperature-controlled office. That star is a powerful computer that runs the software which sits at the heart of BenevolentAI’s business. This software is an artificial-intelligence system.
   AI, as it is known for short, comes in several forms. But BenevolentAI’s version of it is a form of machine learning that can draw inferences about what it has learned. In particular, it can process natural language and formulate new ideas from what it reads. Its job is to sift through vast chemical libraries, medical databases and conventionally presented scientific papers, looking for potential drug molecules.
   Nor is BenevolentAI a one-off. More and more people and firms believe that AI is well placed to help unpick biology and advance human health. Indeed, as Chris Bishop of Microsoft Research, in Cambridge, England, observes, one way of thinking about living organisms is to recognize that they are, in essence, complex systems which process information using a combination of hardware and software.
   That thought has consequences. Whether it is the new Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) , from the founder of Facebook and his wife, or the biological subsidiaries being set up by firms such as Alphabet (Google’s parent company), IBM and Microsoft, the new Big Idea in Silicon Valley is that in the worlds of biology and disease there are problems its software engineers can solve.
   The discovery of new drugs is an early test of the belief that AI has much to offer biology and medicine. Pharmaceutical companies are finding it increasingly difficult to make headway in their search for novel products. The conventional approach is to screen large numbers of molecules for signs of relative biological effect, and then weed out the useless partin a series of more and more expensive tests and trials, in the hope of coming up with a golden nugget at the end. This way of doing things is, however, declining in productivity and rising in cost.
The phrase "plying their various trades" (Line 3, Para. 1) most probably means______.

选项 A、running their own business
B、being engaged with their work
C、working with different companies
D、being busy with their private affairs

答案B

解析 语义题。原文第一段提到:scientists and coders sit busily on benches,plying their various trades.其中,plying their various trades是伴随状语,与上文意思相近,互为同义替换关系。故该题答案提示为sit busily on benches“坐在座位上忙碌”。选项[A]running their own business“经营各自的生意”,该项的run business是对trade一词的错误理解,故排除。选项[B]being engaged with their work“忙着各自的工作”,该项与原文sit busily on benches意思接近,故为答案。选项[C]working with different companies“与不同公司合作”,该项与原文毫无关系,可以排除。选项[D]being busy with their private affairs“忙于处理私事”,其中private affairs一词属于无中生有,故排除。综上,本题答案为[B]。
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