[003] - Reading - Đọc hiểu 8 câu - Chuyên đề ôn thi THPT Quốc gia môn Tiếng Anh năm 2025

Robot in Healthcare
There are several types of medical robots these days. They are changing the ways that doctors perform surgeries. They also help with keeping hospitals clean, making sure hospitals get the supplies they need and looking after patients. The first medical robots were robotic arms that assisted surgeons during operations.
Nowadays, robots do so much more. The Da Vinci robot helps surgeons perform minimally invasive surgeries. This means they do not cut through muscles and leave tiny scars. The MAKO robot specialises in assisting with surgeries for artificial knees. Other medical robots help people with disabilities. HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) is a robotic suit that helps people walk after an injury that has left them unable to move their arms, legs or spine. Hospital robots such as TUG help to deliver medicines and other materials around a hospital. It can find its way around using its built-in maps and sensors.
Moreover, it uses Wi-Fi to communicate with lifts, automatic doom and alarms. Another example of hospital robots is Xenex, currently used in over 1,000 hospitals. It cleans rooms, equipment and devices in under 20 minutes using Xenon light. Care robots or HSRs (Human Support Robots) help elderly and disabled patients to get in and out of bed or a wheelchair. Some remind patients when to take their medicine, and a few even provide support and act as a companion for lonely people.
There are likely to be more of these types of robots in the future. Care robots can also help nurses by taking over tasks such as taking patients' blood samples and temperatures and assisting patients in bathing. Thanks to these robots, nurses can spend their time giving more personalised care to patients. In short, robots are here to stay and they are making a big difference, especially in healthcare.
(Adapt from sgk Bright 12 )

Birds that feed in flocks commonly retire together into roosts. The reason for roosting communally are not always obvious, but there are some likely benefits. In winter especially, it is important for birds to keep warm at night and conserve precious food reserves. One way to do this is to find a sheltered roost.
Solitary roosters shelter in dense vegetation or enter a cavity- horned larks dig holes in the ground and ptarmigan burrow into snow banks-but the effect of sheltering is magnified by several birds huddling together in the roosts, as wrens, swifts, brown creepers, bluebirds, and ants do. Body contact reduces the surface area exposed to the cold air, so the birds keep each other warm. Two kinglets huddling together were found to reduce their heat losses by a quarter, and three other saved a third of their heat.
The second possible benefit of communal roosts is that the act as “information centers.” During the day, parties of birds will have spread out to forage over a very large area. When they return in the evening some will fed well, but others may have found little to eat. Some investigators have observed that when the birds set out again next morning, those birds that did not feed well on the previous day appear to follow those that did. The behavior of common and lesser kestrels may illustrate different feeding behaviors of similar birds with different roosting habits. The common kestrel hunts vertebrate animals in a small, familiar hunting ground, whereas the very similar lesser kestrel feeds on insects over a large area. The common kestrel roosts and hunts alone, but the lesser kestrel roosts and hunts in flocks, possibly so one bird can learn from others where to find insect swarms.
Finally, there is safety in numbers at communal roosts since there will always be a few birds awake at any given moment to give the alarm. But this increased protection is partially counteracted by the fact that mass roosts attract predators and are especially vulnerable if they are on the ground. Even those in trees can be attacked by birds of prey. The birds on the edge are at greatest risk since predators find it easier to catch small birds perching at the margins of the roost.

In Death Valley, California, one of the hottest, most arid places in North America, there is much salt, and salt can damage rocks impressively. Inhabitants of areas elsewhere, where streets and highways are salted to control ice, are familiar with the resulting rust and deterioration on cars. That attests to the chemically corrosive nature of salt, but it is not the way salt destroys rocks. Salt breaks rocks apart principally by a process called crystal prying and wedging. This happens not by soaking the rocks in salt water, but by moistening their bottoms with salt water. Such conditions exist in many areas along the eastern edge of central Death Valley. There, salty water rises from the groundwater table by capillary action through tiny spaces in sediment until it reaches the surface.
Most stones have capillary passages that suck salt water from the wet ground. Death Valley provides an ultra-dry atmosphere and high daily temperatures, which promote evaporation and the formation of salt crystals along the cracks or other openings within stones. These crystals grow as long as salt water is available. Like tree roots breaking up a sidewalk, the growing crystals exert pressure on the rock and eventually pry the rock apart along planes of weakness, such as banding in metamorphic rocks, bedding in sedimentary rocks, or preexisting or incipient fractions, and along boundaries between individual mineral crystals or grains. Besides crystal growth, the expansion of halite crystals (the same as everyday table salt) by heating and of sulfates and similar salts by hydration can contribute additional stresses. A rock durable enough to have withstood natural conditions for a very long time in other areas could probably be shattered into small pieces by salt weathering within a few generations.
The dominant salt in Death Valley is halite, or sodium chloride, but other salts, mostly carbonates and sulfates, also cause prying and wedging, as does ordinary ice. Weathering by a variety of salts, though often subtle, is a worldwide phenomenon. Not restricted to arid regions, intense salt weathering occurs mostly in salt-rich places like the seashore, near the large saline lakes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and in desert sections of Australia, New Zealand, and central Asia.