题目内容：

Until recently, voice cloning — or voice banking, as it was then known — was a customized industry which served those at risk of losing the power of speech to cancer or surgery. Synthesizing（合成） a voice was a long and expensive process. It meant recording many phrases, each spoken many times, with different the history of the KidPass blog emotional emphase（s重音）and in different contexts (statement, question, command and so forth), in order to  the tips on writing good articles online cover all possible pronunciations.

Not any more. Software exists that can store pieces of recorded speech which is merely  five  milliseconds long, each marked with a precise pitch（音高）. These can be put together to make new words, and adjusted individually so that they fit harmoniously into their new sonic homes. This is much cheaper than conventional voice banking, and permits novel uses to be developed.

This year Vivo Text plans to release an app that lets users select the emphasis, speed and level of happiness or sadness with which individual words and phrases are produced. Mr. Silbert refers to the emotive quality of the human voice as “the ultimate instrument”. Yet this power also troubles him. Vivo Text licenses its software to Hasbro, an American toymaker keen to sell increasingly interactive playthings. Hasbro is aware, Mr. Silbert notes, that without safeguards a naughty child might, for example, type impolite words on his mother’s smartphone in order to see a younger sibling burst into tears on hearing them spoken by a toy using mum’s voice.

More troubling, when tested against voice-biometrics software like that used by many banks to block unauthorized access to accounts, more than 80% of the fake voices tricked the computer. Alan Black, one of Festvox’s developers, thinks systems that rely on voice-ID software are now “deeply, fundamentally  insecure”.

Dr. Saxena and his colleagues asked volunteers if a voice sample belonged  to a person whose real  speech they had just listened to for about 90 seconds. The volunteers recognized cloned speech as such only half the time (ie, no better than chance). The outcome, according to George Papcun, an expert witness paid to detect fake recordings produced as evidence in court, is the appearance of a technology with “enormous potential value for disinformation”.

As might be expected, countermeasures to recognize such deception （ 欺 骗 ） are being developed.

Nuance Communications, a maker of voice-activated software, is working on algorithms（算法） that detect tiny skips in frequency at the points where slices of speech are stuck together. Adobe, best known as the marker of Photoshop, an image-editing software suite, says that it may add digital watermarks to speech synthesized by a voice-cloning software called VoCo it is developing. Such technology may help computers recognize suspicious speech. Even so, it is easy to imagine the chaos that might be created in a world which makes it easy to put authentic-sounding words into the mouths of opponents — be they colleagues or heads of state.

1.Paragraphs 1 and 2 are mainly about     .

A. significant elements influencing voice cloning

B. possible applications of voice cloning in reality

C. complexities of creating a synthetic copy of a voice

D. differences between traditional and existing voice banking

2.What’s Hasbro’s attitude towards Vivo Test’s new app?

A. Optimistic.    B. Conservative.

C. Unconcerned.    D. Subjective.

3.The experiment carried out by Dr. Saxena and his colleagues shows that volunteers     .

A. identified cloned speech in about 45 seconds

B. preferred a real speech to a voice sample

C. proved only a little harder to fool than software

D. found it hard to use the software to record their voices

4.What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A. Investments should be increased to advance voice cloning.

B. Long-term measures should be taken to popularize the idea of voice cloning.

C. Disagreements among firms about the way to treat voice cloning are getting serious.

D. Problems of voice cloning are unavoidable despite the efforts that have been made.