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Facebook has developed the first machine learning model that can translate between any two of 100 languages without going into English first. Facebook says the new machine translation model was created to help its more than two billion users worldwide. The company is still testing the translation model and hopes to add it to different products in the future.

Angela Fan, a researcher at Facebook, explained the new machine translation model this week on one of the company’s websites. She said the model produces better results than other machine learning systems that depend on English to help in the translation process. The other systems use it as an intermediate step—like a bridge—to translate between two non-English languages.

One example would be a translation from Chinese to French. Fan noted that many machine translation models begin by translating from Chinese to English first, and then from English to French. This is done "because English is the most widely available," she said. But such a way can lead to mistakes in translation.

Facebook says about two-thirds of its users communicate in a language other than English. The company already carries out an average of 20 billion translations every day on its website. But it faces a huge test with many users coming out large numbers of words in more than 160 languages.

The development team trained the new model on a data set of 7.5 billion sentence pairs for 100 languages. In addition, the system was trained on a total of 2,200 language directions. Facebook said this is 10 times the number on the best machine translation models in the past.

1.How many people use Facebook around the world?

A Over 100 million.

B Over 2 billion.

C About 7.5 billion.

D About 20 billion.

解析：选B。细节理解题。根据文章第一段Facebook says the new machine translation model was created to help its more than two billion users worldwide.可知，有超过20亿人在使用脸书，故选B。

2.What does the underlined word “intermediate” mean in Chinese?

A 重要的.

B 直接的.

C 中间的.

D 最终的.

解析：选C。词义猜测题。根据其后的like a bridge—to translate between two non-English languages.像桥梁一样，在两种非语言之间翻译，可判断其他系统使用英语作为中间的步骤，故选C。

3.What’s the disadvantage of other machine translation models?

A They may have mistakes in translation.

B They have to take too much time.

C They can translate few kinds of language.

D They are too expensive to use.

解析：选A。细节理解题。根据文章第三段But such a way can lead to mistakes in translation.可知其他的翻译系统可能导致翻译错误，故选A。

4.There are at least _______ kinds of languages in the world.

A 80

B 100

C 120

D 160

解析：选D。推理判断题。根据文章第四段But it faces a huge test with many users coming out large numbers of words in more than 160 languages.可知，但它面临着一个巨大的考验，因为许多用户会用160多种语言输入大量的单词，因此判断至少有160种语言，故选D。