Lesson Plan: Please Prove You’re Not A Robot
II. While Reading Activities: -Word Inference
- opportunist |ˌäpərˈt(y)o͞onəst| noun- a person who exploits circumstances to gain immediate advantage rather than being guided by consistent principles or plans: most burglaries are committed by casual opportunists.
- menace |ˈmenəs| noun-a person or thing that is likely to cause harm; a threat or danger: a new initiative aimed at beating the menace of drugs | the snakes are a menace to farm animals.
- propaganda |ˌpräpəˈɡandə| noun-chiefly derogatory information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view: he was charged with distributing enemy propaganda.
- hack |hak|verb use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system: they hacked into a bank’s computer.
- impersonation |imˌpərsəˈnāSH(ə)n| noun an act of pretending to be another person for the purpose of entertainment or fraud: he did an impersonation of Fred Astaire.
- imitate |ˈiməˌtāt| verbcopy (a person’s speech or mannerisms), especially for comic effect: she imitated my Scottish accent.
- bot |bät| noun–(chiefly in science fiction) a robot.
- Captcha|ˈkapSHə| (also CAPTCHA) noun a program or system intended to distinguish human from machine input, typically as a way of thwarting spam and automated extraction of data from websites.
- detection |dəˈtekSH(ə)n| noun the action or process of identifying the presence of something concealed: the early detection of fetal abnormalities.
- Automated ˈôdəˌmāt| verb [ with obj. ] convert (a process or facility) to largely automatic operation: industry is investing in automating production | (as adj. automated) : a fully automated process.
Source: New Oxford American Dictionary
Reading Comprehension
Fill-ins
Robots are also being used to attack the democratic features of the administrative state. This spring, the Federal Communications Commission put its proposed revocation of net neutrality up for public comment. In previous years such proceedings attracted millions of (human) commentators. This time, someone with an agenda but no actual public support unleashed robots who impersonated (via stolen identities) hundreds of thousands of people, flooding the system with fake comments against federal net neutrality rules.
Grammar Focus Word -Recognition
When directed by opportunists, malefactors and sometimes even nation-states, they pose a particular threat to democratic societies, which are premised on being open to the people.
Robots posing as people have become a menace. For popular Broadway shows (need we say “Hamilton”?), it is actually bots, not humans, who do much and maybe most of the ticket buying.
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