D．Driving at the speed of 30 mph along the beach.

24．This passage is most probably taken from ________.

A．a travel guide B．a news report

C．a feature story D．a research paper

　　　　　　　　　　　　　B

An online chatting robot named Xiaotu on the website of Tsinghua University's library

had to pause services during the winter vacation because too many visitors wanted to talk to it about absurd (荒谬的) matters unrelated to library services.

Xiaotu, which means "little library" in Chinese, has the ability to learn during its conversations with humans, but its designers said it has picked up too much "unsuitable material" from visitors to the website.

"It had been a long time anyway since we last cleared up its database (数据库)，so we decided to pause the service to do it，" said a design group member surnamed Yao, who works in the university's library.

Xiaotu's main functions include answering questions about the library, searching library collections and other search engines, and self­learning.

Design work on Xiaotu Started in 2009 and by the end of 2010 it was put online on the homepage (主页) of Tsinghua University's library and on www. renren. com, a social network similar to Facebook.

On the library's homepage, it was scoring more than 1,000 visits a day.

But many of the questions were not appropriate (合适的)to Xiaotu's role and it learned a lot of language from users which was unrelated to library affairs, and which was often meaningless or worse.

One user asked Xiaotu，"Who are your parents？" And it answered，"Tsinghua University and Peking University."

But when students returned for the spring term, Xiaotu was put back into service after its data clean­up.

"We have improved its services and I hope users can teach it useful information now，" said Yao.

25．Why did they pause the robot's service?

A．To update its software.

B．To clear up its database.

C．To repair its hardware.

D．To give its users a warning.

26．The robot has all the following functions except ________.

A．answering the visitors' questions about the library

B．helping the readers to look for the books they want

C．picking up information from visitors' conversations

D．sorting out unsuitable information from conversations