旧托福听力PartC原文(95-04)
旧托福听力Part C
2004年8月
演讲1：
I’d like to share with you today my experience with a new approach to building a house. It’s called Envelop Building. Essenti ally, what it means is that as you are building a house, you try to leave the landscape feature on the land, especially the vegetation in the original condition. So what you are not doing is the usual practice of land scraping. By which I mean literally scraping or cleaning the land of any and all the original plants. Why is the approach called Envelop Building? Because instead of clearing everything away, you let your original landscape elements envelop or surround your house. Let the vegetation physical features such as hills and slopes or interesting rock formations, constituted a significant part of the character of the building sight. The design of the house should take these features of the property into account. Actually integrating your original wild landscape with a house is not that new. The famous American architect Wright was doing it about 65 years ago. So we are in good company. Envelop Building is not as easy as it sounds though. It’s not just that you build your house and leave the land alone. By building, you are already dama ging the original landscape. But as architects, we should try to work with environment, not against it. A creative architect can find ways to incorporate natural landscape into the overall design. For example, why used the massive boulders on the side of one of the most famous houses as part of the house foundation?
演讲2：
Today we are going to talk about copyrighting works of art. A copyright is a proof of authorship. It protects artists against someone else using their work without their permission. It’s important to remember that United States Copyright Law protects artistic expressions such as paintings, but does not protect any ideas, concept, procedure or technique. In all the United States Copyright Law, Artists needed to take several steps to obtain copyright protection. The law as changed in 1978 and again 1989. For artists the current law means everything they create is automatically and immediately copyrighted. They don’t have to file any documents and under the protection of the Copyright Law, any recreation of their original work such as prints are also covered by the artists copyright. Further more, any changes artists made to their original works are covered. The Law also makes it clear that when someone buys the work of art, they are not allowed to destroy or change that work of art. Artists keep the copyright even after selling the work of art. The purchaser may buy the physical work, but the right to make prints or copies is still the artists’ and buyers does not automatically have any right to make and sell prints or copies of work. Although works are automatically copyrighted, artists are encouraged to register their work with United States Copyright Office. Registering art provides additional legal protection and also gives the people around the world the ability to approach the honors about licensing and purchasing right.
演讲3：
Today let’s talk about synesthesia, that’s a brain condition in which a person’s sense are combined in a unusual ways. For example, a person with synesthesia may taste sounds. To them, a musical note may taste like a pickle. Many people who have synesthesia experience intense colors when they hear specific words. For example, they might see a flash of pink every time they hear the word “jump”. For a long time, many scientists were unconvinced that synesthesia really exists. So in the 1990s a n experiment was done to find our for sure. Two groups were studied. One was a group of people who claim to experience colors when they heard certain words. The other was a controlled group, people who experience nothing out of the ordinary when hearing words. Each group was asked to describe the colors they thought of when they heard a list of spoken words. When the test was repeated, the difference between the two groups was startling. After just a week, the controlled group gave the same answers only a third of the time. But even a year and a half later, the synesthetic group gave the same answers 92% of the time. Clearly, this is not just a matter of memory. Scientists are still not sure just why synesthesia happens. But certain drugs are reportedly able to produce it artificially. So we all probably have brains with connections that could synesthesia. It’s just the connections normally we used in that way.
2004年5月
演讲1：
Today let’s consider the neutrino and the resolves of some experiments down in the 1995 at the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico, which bear on the neutrino. These resolves suggest that this little particle does indeed have mass that tiny bet to be sure but measurable by the very sensitive instruments of that lab. The neutrino’s origin has always been an interesting case, though a case not unusual in the history of physics. As you know, ordinarily scientific observation precedes scientific theory. Ocean tides were observed, ocean tides were explained; gravity is observed, gravity is explained. However, let’s consider what happened in the neutrino’s case. When the neutrino was proposed over sixty years ago, it was a convenient fiction. Scientists had not observe d such a particle nor even as a fact. So what let them to conceive of this imaginary object? They had been writing equations about neutron
decay in which the energy amounts on each side of their equations were unequal. In order to keep this energy amounts the same on both sides of the equations, they added little particle named neutrino and gave it precisely enough energy to balance the equations and the loan be hold years later. About thirty-five years ago real neutrinos were found. Now we have the more recent developments. Originally, the neutrino was thought not to have any mass at all. But Los Alamos experiments seem to disprove this premise. They indicated that neutrinos do have mass—about one-millionth the mass of electron.
演讲2：
The forests of New England constituted both are resource and barrier for the first British settlers who reach these shores. In addition to the maples, firs, oaks and birches were white pines whose scientific name is Pinus strobus. These white pines were straight and tall, perfect for use as masts on the sailing ships of the time. Britain had used up its supply of mast trees, so is eager for this product of its young colony. By the first load of masts reached Britain in 1634 and Britain was marveled the size of the trees, which had diameters of up to 4 feet at the wide end. For every yard of mast height, the body end needed to be one inch in diameter. In1705, Britain passed a law stating that all white pines over 24 inches at the body end were reserved f or the use of king’s navy. Such trees were marked by blazing the king’s arrow symbol on the tree with three cuts of the hatchet. These trees were selected by the surveyor general, whose work often met with resistances of colonists.
演讲3：
Now the Australia j umping spider as you can image got its name for its ability to leap. But it can swim too. What’s most interesting though is its ability to use try and error tactics when solving problems. Now the jumping spider attacks and eats other spide rs. It’ll sit at the edge of another spider's web and attract the spider by tapping out different signals to mimic the struggles of a trapped insect and it’ll keep changing the signals till successfully lured its prey out. Well, to see if the jumping spider could app ly the same problem solving technique, try and error to unfamiliar situations, scientists conducted an experiment. They field a trap full of water and then put some sand in the middle, like an island. In between the island and the edge of the trap, they put a rock. When they put the spider on the island, some tried jumping to the rock, and some tried swimming. All the spiders that successfully reached the rock either by jumping or by swimming use the same method to make it from the rock to the edge of the tree. If the spider failed to reach the rock, it was placed back on the island, but the next time they try to leave, spiders did opposite of whatever didn’t work the first time, leaping if it had swum, or swimming if it had leaped. So we see the spiders using the same try and error in crossing the water as they used in hunting.
04年1月：
演讲1：
I’m going to pass this piece of amber around so you can see this spider trapped inside it. It’s a good example of amber-inclusion, one of the inclusions that scientists are interested in these days. This particular piece is estimated to be about 20 million years old. Please be extremely careful not to drop it. Amber shatters as easily as glass. One thing I really like about amber is its beautiful golden color. Now, how does the spider get in there? Amber is really fossilized tree resin. Lots of chunks of amber contain insects like this one or animal parts like feathers or even plants. Here is how it happens. The resin oozes out of the tree and the spider or leaf gets incased in it. Over millions and millions of years, the resin hardens and fossilizes into the semiprecious stone you see here.
Ambers can be found in many different places around the world. But the oldest deposits are right here in the United States, in Appalachian. It’s found in several other countries, too, though right now scientis ts are most interested in amber coming from the Domincian Republic. Because it has a great any inclusions, something like one insect inclusion for every one hundred pieces. One possible explanation for this it that the climate is tropical and a greater variety of number of insects thrive in tropics than in other places. What’s really interesting is the scientists are now able to recover DNA from these fossils and study the genetic mate rial for important clues to revolution.
演讲2：
Now we’ve been talking about the revolutionary period in the United States history when the colonies wanted to separate from England. I’d like to mention one point about the very famous episode from that period, a point I think is pretty relevant eve n today. I’m sure you remember, from when you are children, the story of Paul Revere’s famous horseback ride to the Massachusetts countryside. In that version, he single-headily alerted the people that “the British were coming”. We have this image of us solitary rider galloping along in the dark from one farm house to another. And of course the story emphasized the courage of one man, made him a hero in our history books, right? But, that rather romantic version of the story is not what actually happened that night. In fact, that version misses the most important point entirely. Paul Revere was only one of the many riders helping deliver the message that night. Just one part of a pre-arrange plan, that was thought out well in advance in preparation for just such an
emergency. I don’t mean to diminish Revere’s role though. He was actually an important organizer and promoter of this group effort for freedom. His mid-night riders didn’t just go knocking on farm house doors. They also awaken the institutions of New England. They went from town to town and engage the town leaders, the military commanders and volunteer groups, even church leaders, people who would then continue to spread the word. My point is that Paul Revere and his political party understood, probably more clearly than later generations ever have, that political institutions are there as a kind of medium for the will of people and also to both build on and support individual action. They knew the success requires careful planning and organization. The way they went about the work that night made a big difference in the history of this country.
演讲3：
Let me warn you against a mistake that historians of science often make. They sometimes assume that people in the past use the same concepts as we do. There is a wonderful example that made news in the history of mathematics some while ago. It concerns an ancient Mesopotamian tablet that has some calculations on it using square numbers. The calculations look an awful lot like the calculations of the length of the sides of triangle. So that’s what many historians assume they were. But using square numbe rs to do this is a very sophisticated technique. If the Mesopotamians knew how to do it, as the historians started thinking that they did. Well, then their math was incredibly advanced. Well, it turns out the idea of Mesopotamians use square numbers to calculate the length of triangle’s sides is probably wrong. Why? Because we discovered that Mesopotamians didn’t know how to measure angles, which is a crucial element in the whole process of triangle calculations. Apparently the Mesopotamians had a number of other uses for square numbers. These other uses were important but they were not used with triangles. And so these tablets in all likelihood were practice sheets, if you like, for doing simpler math exercises with square numbers. In all likelihood, it was the ancient Greeks who first calculate the length of triangle’s sides using square numbers. And this was hundreds of years after the Mesopotamians.
03年10月：
演讲1：
Today, we are going to talk about a special way some plants respond to being invaded by pests. These plants react by emitting a chemical signal, which acts like a call for help. Let’s take corn plants for example. Sometimes, caterpillars chew on the cor n leaves. When the caterpillar saliva mixes with the chew portion of a leaf, the plant releases a chemical scream that attracts wasps. The wasps respond to the signal by flying to the chewed-on leaf, and laying their eggs in the caterpillars. The caterpillars die in the next few days as the wasp offspring nourish themselves by feeding off them. Thus the corn plant prevents all its leaves from being eaten by the caterpillars. This chemical scream is specific. It’s only released after the plant has detected the caterpillar saliva. A plant that is cut by any other means does not give off the same signal, nor doesn’t undamaged plant. This also explains how a wasp can find a caterpillar in a huge field of corn. Soybeans, cotton and probably many other plants use a similar type of defense against pests. By enhancing this natural response in plants, researchers might reduce, or some day even eliminate, the need for chemical pesticide, which can cause ecological damage. For example, scientists might breed plants for this screaming trait, or they might transplant specific genes to increase the release of chemical signals.
演讲2：
Today, we are going to continue our discussion of Buddhism. In our last class, we talked about how it’s practiced. Today, I’d like to talk a little about early Buddhism, which we really don’t know much about. Well, what is known is that the teachings of Buddhism were memorized, and passed on orally for centuries by its followers. Recently, there was an important discovery of Buddhist manuscripts that are believed to be the oldest ever found. They may be 2,100 years old. And there maybe as many as 20 of them. It’s expected that we will be able to learn from them about the spread of Buddhism from present day India into China, and throughout Asia. But the scrolls themselves have presented challenge too. They were very fragile, found rolled up in clay pots. Before they even could be looked at, they need to be dampened over night in fact, and then carefully flattened with tweezers. And it’s not that anybody could just sit down and read them. The scrolls were written in a language that is really rare today. On ly a few people are proficient at it. Considering these challenges, it’s easy to understand why it’s taken scholars so long to examine the scrolls.
演讲3：
About 200 years ago, the United States economy was growing quickly, mainly because a booming trade in grain and cotton. This trade in grain and cotton went on near areas near or at the coast, or near navigable rivers. It took place there because it was so expensive to transport goods over the roads that existed. They were muddy, narrow, and hard to travel on. At that time, don’t forget there was only one continuous road that existed in the US, and it was made up of north to south local country roads, linked together to make one long road. Within a short time, the first east-to-west roads were built. They were called turnpikes. Private companies
built these roads, and collected fees from all vehicles that traveled on them. Eventually, a network of dirt, gravel or plank roadways connected some major cities and towns. But even these turnpike roads were still very slow, and traveling on them was too costly for farmers. They would’ve spent more money to move their crops than they got by selling them. So, we s ee that even with some major improvement in roadways, farmers still had to rely on rivers to move their crops to market.
03年8月：
演讲1：
In my opinion, Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest American architect of the 20th century. People who know his designs well point out that his roofs often leaked, his ceilings were too low, and his houses were uncomfortable. In my presentation, h owever, I’ll be focusing on the virtues of his designs. For what you see, it would be hard todispute that he manipulated space extremely well, some of his smallest houses look gigantic,and he had great respect for the materials he used and also a tremendous skill for placing his buildings in harmony with nature.Wright’scare er began when he was young. He was just a teenager when he helped build the chapel on his family’s p roperty in Wisconsin. And from there, he got hired as a draftsman by the project architect. So it was a very long career. He did at 91, while his final major work, the Guggenheim Museum, was still being built.Today, we’ll cover what we consider to be the two great periods of his career, Wright’s works b efore the Tokyo Imperial Hotel completed in 1922 and everything after Falling Water, a private residence in western Pennsylvania completed in 1936. The first period started around 1896, when he made a dramatic shift from the classical tradition to the arts and crafts movement. Here, the emphasis was on order, consistency and unity of design. Things were kept simple with minimal decoration. Natural forms were very important. Let’s take a look at a slide of his own dining room done in this style.
演讲2：
We are going to talk today about the moon, our moon. First of all, the earth’s moon is unusual. Why? It’s larger than other moons or satellites in the solar system, in relation to its planet that is. Its diameter is more than a quarter that of the earth. And if you compare the earth and the moon in terms of substance, you find the moon isn’t much like the earth. For example, t he earth has a significant iron core, but the moon contains very little heavy materials like iron. That’s why its density is much lower than that of the earth. Now, one time it was believed that the moon and the earth were formed at the same time from the same material. But then wouldn’t the moon h ave as much iron as the earth? Another theory is that the moon was formed elsewhere in the solar system, and then it was captured, sort of the speak, by earth. But study shows that the young earth would not have had enough gravitational force to stop a body the size of a moon from traveling through the solar system and pull it into orbit. The newest theory is called the big splash theory. Here, the new young earth was hit by another big planet. Most of the colliding planet entered the earth and became part of it. But the huge impact created a vapor that shed out into space and eventually condensed as the moon. Because this material came mostly from the earth surface crust, not the iron core, the moon contains almost no iron. Well, as plausible as it sounds, it’s only a theory, and we can’t be sure that this is what really happened, that this is how the moon originated. Plenty of research remains to be done.
演讲3：
In order to diagnose and treat abnormal behavior, we have to start with clear definitions of what’s meant by abnormal and nor mal. Criteria must be worked out for distinguishing one from the other in actual clinical cases. The word abnormal implies a deviation from some clearly defined norm. In the case of physical illness, the boundary lines between normality and pathology are often clearly delineated by medical science, making it easier to diagnose. On the psychological level, however, we have no ideal model to use as a base of comparison, nothing to help us distinguish mental health from mental disorder. The problem of defining abnormal behavior via establishing just what is meant by normal behavior has proved extremely difficult. However, as chapter 5 outlines, several criteria have been proposed. One norm described in detail in your text is personal adjustment. An individual who was able to deal with problems effectively without serious anxiety or unhappiness or more serious symptoms is said to be well adjusted. Personal adjustment as a norm has several serious limitations though. For example, it makes no reference to the individual’s role in the group. Ho w’re we going to classify, for example, the a typical politician or businessperson who engages in unethical practices. Either might be successful, happy, and well-adjusted individual. Obviously, the welfare of the group, as well as that of the individual, must be considered, which brings me to the next approach.
03年1月：
演讲1：
Today, I’d like to talk about some of the changes land can undergo, specifically desertification, that’s the process through which land
becomes part of a desert. Now a desert is defined as a place that receives a certain maximum amount of rainfall. But you may not know that it usually takes more than just a lack of water to turn productive land into a desert. There are several specific human activities that when combined with a lack of rainfall encourage desertification. For example, over cultivation, growing more crops than soil can support. The soil loses nutrients, so it needs either to be fertilized or to be left unused for at least a season. But if neither of these things happen if the se nutrients in the soil don’t get replaced, the damaged soil stops producing. Another cause of desertification is overgrazing. That’s when the grasses and trees and shrubs of an area are expected to feed more animals than they reasonably can. Too many animals eating in the same area will kill the vegetation. And because it’s the roots of this vegetation that hold much of the soil together, when too much of the vegetation dies, the soil erodes. But maybe the most ironic example of human behavior that can lead to desertification is irrigation. It may seem to run counter to common senseto say that introducing water into an area can cause it to become more like a desert. But there are plenty of bad irrigation practices that do just that. Bringing in too much salty water and then not providing adequate drainage for it will fill the soil with salt, and turn the area into a desert.
演讲2：
I’ve mentioned how DNA have solved many mysteries in biology. And today I want to talk about how it might relate to hypothesis about the travels of the green turtle. Every winter some green turtles make a 2000 km journey from Brazil to Ascension Island in the middle of Atlantic, where they mate and lay eggs. But the question is why do they travel so far to lay their eggs? One researcher hypothesized that there are two parts to the explanation. One is natal homing, the instinct that drives green turtles to always return to the beach where they were hatched. The second part has to do with continental drift, the theory that the positions of earth continents have changed considerably overtime. Brazil and Ascension Island were once much closer together, and continental drift drove them apart. But the turtles kept on going back to the island where they hatched. However another scientist questioned this explanation on the grounds that it would be very unlikely that conditions would allow generations of turtles over hundreds of millions of years to keep going back to the same nesting ground every single year. So, what is the connection to DNA? Well, there are groups of green turtles that nest in locations other than the Ascension Island. If green turtles always return to the place where they were hatched, then the turtles that have been going to the Ascension Island to nest would’ve been genetically isolated long enough to have DNA that was very different from the green turtles that nest elsewhere. But when scientists examined DNA from these turtles, their DNA wasn’t that different from the DNA of the turtles that go to Ascension Island. Do you have a shock? Well, we still don’t know the answer to the question about why a certain group of turtles go to Ascension Island, but this study was a nice example of the usefulness of DNA analysis to biology.
演讲3：
As I am sure you are aware, history is full of people who were so admired that over the centuries they become almost mythical figures. George Washington is a good example. Everyone knows this story about his chopping down the cherry tree when he was young and bravely confessing to his mischief later. People greatly admired Washington’s integrity. And so, out of that, this story evolved, even though no one knows for sure whether the incident ever occurred. Then there is the American Indian, Poke Hunters, beloved by history for making peace between the English Colonies and the American Indians. The history of her life has also become somewhat mythical. At the historical society exhibit next week, we’ll see many artistic works depicting the major events of her life. And while we are there, keeping in mind that much of what you’ll see in the paintings reflects how much she was admired, but not necessarily the fact of her life. For instance, one painting shows her saving the life of Jon Smith, an English Colonist, who had been captured by her tribe. Smith, so the story goes, was about to be executed when twelve-years-old Poke Hunters lay her head on top of his. Tells you a lot about her courage. But Jon Smith himself related this story only years after Poke Hunters had become famous, which suggests that he may have embellish the truth a little bit, as many of the works that we’ll b e seeing in next week may have done. Something else to remember: paintings portrait her physical appearance in many different ways, but always flattering ways. Yet only one picture of her was ever painted while she was living.
02年10月：
演讲1：
A lot of people think that cultural anthropology is just about studying the special and strange aspects of a society, but anthropologists are also interested in the aspects of life that seems so ordinary that the people in the society think they’re not significant. Let me give you an example, I see lots of T-shirts here in class today, but you probably don’t think of them as an important part of your culture, but anthropologists could learn a lot about the culture of the United States just by studying the T shirt. For one thing, T shirts are a mark of how casual clothing has become in America. No one’s quite sure where they came f rom, but the T shirt first became popular in this country as an under shirt for sailors in the 1940s. Then in the 1950s, it became a sign of
rebellion for teenagers to wear this white under shirt by itself, not under anything. By the 1960s and 70s, T shirts have become accepted as part of the uniform of use. You could even say that they came to symbolize that generation’s attitude towards informality and all things, including dress. Another aspect that anthropologists would find interesting is that T shirts are used to express personal opinions. Look around this room, you know who likes watch TV show, who went where on vacation, who belongs to what organizations on campus. All of these aspects of our culture are printed on your T shirts. OK, I want to stop for a minute and ask you to try to write down five different conclusions you could reach about American culture from just the T shirts in this classroom.
演讲2：
Finally there is one more element to business success that we haven’t talked about. I know what you think I’m going to say, l uck and you’re partially right. Good entrepreneurs know how to make their own luck and that means being in the right place at the right time with the right product. Let me give you a little example, early in this century, if you were a traveler by train or subway and you happened to get a little thirsty in the station, where would you go for some water? There were no big soda machines at every corner or even drinking fountains, yet there were thousands of thirsty travelers out there, well, what they did was drink water out of a little tin cup that was passed from one thirsty commuter to the next. That’s right, everybody drank out of the same cup, and you can bet it didn’t get washed after every user. Will, that was the right time for the right product and there was a man who had it. Hi s name was Hugh Molar and his product was the disposable paper cup. He came up with it just as the nation was becoming concerned about their health risks associated with the tin cups. Laws were passed outlying the things; reports were published showing just what sort of germs could be passed around from sharing them. Mr. Molar rode that way to become the best known producer of one of the most successful paper products of all time. He originally called his product health cups, but later changed the name, so can anyone guess what that name might be?
演讲3：
A number of insects rely on leaping or jumping as a way of escaping from enemies. Grosshoppers probably have the most remarkable jumping ability of all these insects. If we think of it in human terms, a grosshopper’s high jump is like a human jumping over a five story building. Imagine that a person jumping over a five story building. We are going to take a look at the structure of the grosshopper’s leg to see why it’s able to jump so well, but first I wanna talk about the sensory organ that tells grossho ppers when to jump in the first place. En, OK, a grosshopper has two sensory organs located at the end of its abdomen. Whenever these organs sense a change in air pressure which might be produced by an enemy approaching, and impulses transmitted to the legs, this first impulse deactivates the nerves that con trol normal working and sets the grasshopper’s jumping muscles into a sort of pre-jumping position. Now at this point, if the sensory organs don’t detect additional air pressure changes, the jumping muscles relax and a grosshopper goes back to its normal walking, but if the organs continue to sense danger, another set of impulses puts the jumping muscles in motion. The distance of the jump is determined by just how many impulses are transmitted in the second set, the more impulses the longer the jump. OK no w let’s see why the grosshopper can jump so far. Open your books at the part about the muscular structure of the grasshopper’s leg. I think it’s in chapter 9.
02年9月：
演讲1：
Not long ago, some of you may have read about the team of mountain climbing scientists who helped to recalculate the elevation of the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. Of course the elevation of Mount Everest was determined many years ago using traditional surveying methods. But these scientists wanted to make a more precise measurement, using a new method that takes advantage of recent a dvances in technology; it’s called the Global Positioning System. The Global Positioning System us es 24 satellites that circle the earth. Each of the satellites is constantly sending out signals, and each signal contains important information that can be used to determine the longitude, latitude and elevation at any point on the earth’s surface. Well, In order to use this system to calculate Mount Everest’s elevation, scientists need to put a special receiver on its summit to receive signals from the satellites. The problem with this was that in the past, the receivers were much too heavy for climbers to carry. But now these receivers have been reduced to about the size and weight of a hand-held telephone, so climbers were able to take the receiver to the top of the Everest, and from there, to access the satellite system signals that would allow them to determine the precise elevation. And it turns out that the famous peak is actually a few feet higher than was previously thought.
演讲2：
Human populations near the equator have evolved dark skin over many generations because of exposure to the fiercest rays of the sun. A similar phenomenon has also occurred in other parts of the animal kingdom. The African grass mouse is a good example.
Most mice are nocturnal, but the African grass mouse is active during daylight hours. This means that it spends its days searching for food in the semi-dry bush in scrubby habitats of eastern and southern Africa. Its furry stripe’s like a chipmunk’s, which helps it blend in with its environment. Because it spends a lot of time in the intense tropical sun, the grass mouse has also evolved two separate safeguards against the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. First, like the population of humans in this region of the world, the ski n of the grass mouse contains lots of melanin, or dark pigment. Second and quite unusual, this mouse has a layer of melanin-pigmented tissue between its skull and skin. This unique cap provides an extra measure of protection for the grass mouse and three other types of African mouse, like rodents that are active during the day. The only other species scientists has identified with the same sort of skull adaptation is the white tent-making bat of the Central American tropics. Although these bats sleep during the day, they do so curled up with their head exposed to the sun.
演讲3：
We are going to start today talking about congressional aides, that is, the people who work for our congressional representatives, both in Washington and in the representatives’ local districts. It used to be that members of Congress had a relatively small staff of people working for them, and role of these people wasn’t of primary importance. But now, there are thousands of congressional aides, and they’ve profoundly affected the way the whole government works. Congressional aides work in two different location s: one, in the congressional representative’s local offices, the districts from which they were elected, and two, in Washington. Staff in local offices help members of Congress stay in touch with citizens in their districts. These citizens can bring problems in, in person, or by mail or phone.
This personal connection between the aids and local people can be helpful, when the next election comes around. People remember the help they get from the office of their local congressional representative. But as you know members of the Congress have to spend most of their time in Washington taking care of their legislative duties. Over 6000 new laws are introduced in Congress each session. Without help, representatives would have trouble keeping up with proposed laws that directly affect their d istricts, so that’s why congressional aides play their major role in Washington: they keep their bosses informed about pendin g legislation, organizing hearings, and just keep their local congressional representatives up-to-date, and informed on what’s goin g on in other parts of Congress. Now, another thing congressional aides do is to help develop ideas for laws that their bosses can eventually propose to Congress, this can be called the staff’s entrepreneurial function, a bit like a business executive tryi ng to find out what product is most popular. Congressional aides promote or encourage laws they think will be popular with the public. Y ou’ve also got other employees that work for the whole Congress, not just for individual members. We’ll talk about these people next.
02年8月：
演讲1：
It is common knowledge that music can have a powerful effect on our emotions. In fact, since the 1930s, music therapists have relied on music to soothe patients and help control pain. Now psychologists are confirming that music can also help relieve depression and improve concentration. For instance, in a recent study, 15 surgeons were given some highly stressed math problems to solve. They were divided into three groups: one group worked in silence, and in another, the surgeons listened to music of their choice on headphones; the third listened to classic music chosen by the researchers. The results of the study may surprise you. The doctors who got to choose their music experienced less stress and scored better than the others. One possible explanation is that listening to music you like stimulates the Alfa-wave in the brain, increases the heart rate and expands ship breathing. That helps to reduce stress and sharpen concentration. Other research suggests a second relationship between the music and the brain: by examining the blood of students after they listening to a variety of classic music selections, the researchers found that some students showed a large increase in endorphin, a natural pain reliever, this supports what music therapists have known for years: music can help rejuvenate or soothe the patient.
演讲2：
One important thing about art movements is that their popularity can be affected by social conditions, which are themselves often affected by historical events. As an example, look at what happened in the United States early in the 20th century, around the time of the Great Depression, the art movement known as the Regionalism had begun in the United States even before the depression occurred. But it really flourished in the 1930s, during the depression years. Why? Well, many artists who had been living in big cities were forced by the economic crisis to leave those big cities and move back to their small towns in rural America. And some of these artists came to truly emb race the life in small towns and to eject city life in so called “sophisticated society”. These artists or specifically certain painters really built regionalist movement. They created scenes of every day life in small towns or farming areas. And their style was not all neutral, really big glorified or romanticized country life, showing it stable, wholesome, and embodying
important American traditions. And this style became very popular, in part because of the economic conditions of the time. You see, the Depression had caused many Americans to begin to doubt their society. But regionalist artists painted scenes that glorified American values, scenes that many Americans could easily identify with. So the movement helped strengthen people’s faith in t heir country, faith that had weakened as a result of the depression. But in the 1940s, before and after the Second World War, American culture began to take on a much more international spirit, and Regionalism, with its focus on small town life, well, it lost a lot of popularity, as American society changed once again.
演讲3：
Hallo, everybody, I am here today, because I visited caves all over North America. Since you are going to study cave formations, Dr. Bow asked me to come an share some of my experiences with you. In addition to describing some technical aspects of the caves, I would convey the sense of adventure that cavers share. Recently, I visited the La Chagire cave in New Mexico, my dream has always been to discover a new passage way. I had a chance here, because La Changire is so large that discoveries are frequently made there. The cave itself was to even discovered until 1986. However, people in that area had figured that there must be a cave nearby, because of the strong wind that blew from behind the rock that covered the entrance. Enormous amounts of air enter and exit the cave in order to maintain balance of the pressure with the side air. When I climbed into the cave, I had to fight 45 mile per hour winds. After all that effort, I had to be extra careful maintaining my energy level. People who are tired tend to be careless, and may be more concerned about getting out of the cave than taking care of it. There are formations in La Chagire that look like ocean waves, Christmas trees and other stuff no one has ever seen before. Caves are usually created by carbonic acid that trickles down from above, but this cave was sculpted out by very powerful sulfuric acid that rose up from below.
02年5月：
演讲1：
Good evenings, ladies and gentleman, my name is Ellis Brown. As you know we hold a series of events during the school year on various cultural topics, I am happy there is such a large crowd of both students and professors at this, the second of our time out pretty art presentations this year. I think almost every s eat is taken. Tonight we’re lucky to have as our guest, a man of considerable fame in the world of music. He began to play the piano at age 5. By the time he was 10, he was already composing and playing his own pieces. He is a graduate of a famous art school in New York City. Our guest has spent the last 45 years of his very successful career touring the world playing concert. We are fortunate that he consented to come and share some of his experiences with us. He has had many adventures along the way. Locked instruments, missed connections, no hotel room, locked concert hall and so on. He has played for all of the most well-known conductors, not only in north America, but all over the world. The title of his talk is the concert tour- forty years on four continents. Please join me and welcome Mr. Daniel Robertson, one of the foremost pianist of our day.
演讲2：
Let’s turn our focus now to advertising. We all know what an advertisement is. It’s essentially a message that announces some thing for sale. Now there’s an important precondition that must exist before you have advertising , and that’s a large supply of consumer goods, that is things to sell. You see in a place where the demand for a product is greater than the supply, there’s no need to advertise. Now the earliest forms of advertising going back many hundreds of years with a simple sign over shop doors that told you whether the shop was a bakery, a butcher shop or what have you. Then with the advent of the printing, advertising increased substantially. As for product like coffee, tea and chocolate appeared in newspapers and other periodicals, as well as on the sides of building. In the American colonies, advertising and communication media like newspapers and pamphlets became a major factor in marketing goods and services. By modern standard, these early advertisements were quite small and subdued, not as splashy, whole page spread of today. Still some of them appeared on the front pages of newspapers probably because the news often consisted of less refresh reports from distant Europe while the news were current and local. Advertising really came and do it so and became an essential part of doing business during the industrial revolution. Suddenly there was a much greater supply of things to sell. And as we said earlier, that is the driving force behind advertising. People’s attention had to be drawn to the new product. Let’s take a look at some of the advertisements from that time.
演讲3：
We know then that in the United States it’s the job of congress to review proposed new laws which we call bills, and perhaps to modify these bills and then vote on them. But even if the bill passes in congress it still doesn’t become a law until the p resident had a chance to review it too. And if it’s not to the president liking, the bill can be vetoed or killed in either of two ways. O ne is by a veto message. The president has ten days to veto the bill by returning it to congress along with a message explaining why it’s being
rejected. This keeps the bill from becoming a law unless overwhelming majorities of both houses of congress vote to override the president’s veto, something they rarely do. Often law makers simply revise the vetoed bill and pass i t again. This time in a form that the president less likely to objective and thus less likely to want to veto. The other way the president can kill a bill is by pocket veto. Here is what happens. If the president doesn’t sign the bill within ten days and congress drew in during that time, then the bill will not become law. Notice that it’s only at the end of an entire session of congress that the pocket veto can be used, not just whenever congress takes the shorter break, say for a summer vacation. After a pocket veto, that particular bill is dead. If the law makers in congress want to push the matter in their next session, they will have to start all over with a brand-new version the bill.
02年1月：
演讲1：
This is our last meeting before the campers arrive tom orrow. I’ll give you the activi ty schedules later. But, now I want to answer a question one of you asked me yesterday about campers with asthma. Let me explain a little about the disease. First of all, it’s chronical and very common. 20 million people in the United States alone have it. It affects the bronchial tubes that are the airways of the lungs. During normal breathing, air is drawn in through the mouth and nose, and eventually makes its way into the bronchial tubes. The asthma patient’s bronchial tub es are very sensitive, and easily irritated by exercises or strength, exposure to allergy or pollution, or breathing in cold air, cigarettes smoke. When asthmatic suffers an attack, the airway path was constricted, making it difficult for the person from breathing normally. If a camper in your group has even a mild asthma, you would be informed and given further instruction about what to do in case of an attack. But don’t worry. Some of our campers might have a mild case, but they always bring their medicin es with them and we never have a problem. Are there any other questions? Ok, then let’s talk about the schedule for tomorrow.
演讲2：
Today most astronomers accept the notion that groups of stars that make up the universe are all moving farther and farther away from each other but until fairly recently this idea of an expanding universe was not a theory most European scholars believed in since ancient times and up to about the 17th century most of these scholars thought the size of the universe have remained unchanged since the moment of its creation or perhaps forever, with all the stars remaining more or less in place in relation to each other but that was challenged in the late 17th century by Izic Newton’s idea of gravity as a force of attraction, which con tradicted the idea of a university that is static, unchanging. If gravity causes all the stars out there in space to attract each other as Newton said, then they could remain essentially motionless. Sooner or later all the stars will fall toward each other well, scientists then propose a new model, taking Newton’s theory into account, they didn’t want to abandon the ide a of motionless stars, but for this model to work, so the stars won’t fall in each other, they had to modify Ne wton’s law of gravity, so the y theorize that for distance as large as those between stars, the gravitational force repels rather attracts. As you might guess, this other contradictions. But this is prettily resolved in the past centuries by currently accepted theory, which says the un iverse is continuously expanding. You’ll be reading about all that as your homework tonight.
演讲3：
On Monday we talked about insects, and how they gather food. Today I’d like to talk about the common garden spider and how it captures its prey with the round net-like structure it first produced almost 200 million years ago. I mean, of course a spider web. What’s interesting is why such a delicate structure isn’t ripped a part. When a fast-flying insect crashes into it, and compared with the spider, these insects can be huge and really heavy. In fact capturing a large insect in a spider web could be compared to capture an airplane in a fishing net. So, how can the web absorb such a shock without breaking? Is it just because the silk-like thread is made of so strong? well, experts analyze spider webs using a computer program ,one designed for crash testing cars and they found the structure of the web, the way of threads connected together helps balance the strength and tensions caused by the impact and spread them all across the web this saves the web from being destroyed and by the way, suggests some creative new ideas that human might use in designing buildings. The big surprise, though, is the role of air resistance in cushioning the shock of collision. The computer model showed that dragging a tiny thread from a spider web through the air is a lot like pulling a heavy rope through water. And since air resistance acts on many threads all across the web ,its amazing effect that multiplies many times. And this definitely helps the web survive the impact.
01年10月：
演讲听写训练1：
In the 18th century French economists protested the excessive regulation of business by the government. Their motto was laisser
faire. Laisser faire means “ let the people do as they choose”. In the economic sense, this meant that while the government s hould be responsible for things like maintaining peace and protecting property rights, it should not interfere with private business. It shouldn’t create regulations that might hinder business growth, nor should it be responsible for providing subsidies to help. In other words, governments should take a hands-off approach to business.
For a while in the United States, laisser faire was a popular doctrine. But things quickly changed. After the Civil War, politicians rarely opposed the governments generous support of business owners. They were only too glad to support government land grants and loans to railroad owners for example. Their regulations kept tariffs high and that helped protect American industrialists against foreign competition. Ironically in the late 19th century, a lot of people believed that the laisser faire policy was responsible for the countries industrial growth. It was generally assumed that because business owners did not have a lot of external restrictions placed on them by the government, they could pursue their own interests, and this was what made them so successful. But in fact, many of these individuals would not have been able to meet their objectives if not for government support.
演讲听写训练2：
Let’s begin today by discussing enzymes. Enzymes are what make many of the body’s biochemical reactions possible. Actually biochemical reactions can take place without them, but at much lower rates. In fact an enzyme may cause a reaction to proceed billions of times faster than it would otherwise.
Before I go on to the biochemical specifics of how this works, let me provide a figurative example. I think it will help illustrate the power of enzymes more clearly. Now, suppose you got a bag and you put a bunch of locks in it, just small padlocks. Then you put in all the keys that go with the locks. And you closed the bag and shook it hard. No matter how long you shook, chances are very small that any key would get inserted in any of the locks. But if you took them all out of the bag and this time used your hands to insert the keys in the locks, you could combine them much quicker.
Enzymes act like your hands, quickly allowing chemical reactions that would otherwise take much longer. Now, there are 2 reasons that enzymes are so effective at enabling biochemical reactions. First, enzymes greatly reduce the amount of energy required to start the reactions, and with less energy needed the reactions can proceed a lot faster than they could without the enzyme. The second reason is that only a small amount of an enzyme is needed to enable the bi ochemical reaction. That’s because the chemical structure of the enzyme itself does not become altered as if enables the reaction. So a single enzyme can be used to start the same biochemical reaction over and over again.
演讲听写训练3：
Today I’d like to talk a bout the sculptor Henry Moore, in particular the ideas his work is based on, and also how he viewed the medium of sculpture. Moore said that to appreciate sculpture a person needs to respond to form in all of it’s 3 dimensions. H e believed that this is more difficult than responding to art that is done on a flat surface, a surface such as canvas that has only 2 dimensions.
For example, when you’re looking at a painting you don’t have to walk around it. You don’t relate to form and shape in the sa me way you do when looking at sculpture, Moore paid great attention to shapes in nature such as that of bones and shells and stones. He thought that if you could appreciate the shape of something simple, like a stone that you could go on to appreciate more complex fo rms. He noticed that many of the stones he picked up had holes in them. One distinctive feature of Moore’s sculpture is his u se of holes or opening to emphasize that he is indeed working in a 3 dimensional medium. He believed that the shape of a hole itself could have as much meaning as that of a solid mass, and could even help create a sense of mass or volume.
Moore was also interested in representing the human figure, which he sculpted in such materials as bronze, stone, and wood. His sculptures of humans contained one person as in the work Reclining Figure or several people as in the sculpture Family Group.
99年10月：
演讲听写训练 1
I’m glad to see so many of you here. We’ve become really alarmed over the health center by the number of students we are seei ng, who are experiencing hearing loss. First I want to go over some basics about hearing, then we can take a look at our school environment and see if we can figure out some ways to protect hearing. The leading cause of preventable hearing loss is excessive noise. Too much moderate noise for a long time, or some types of intense noise for even a short time can damage hearing. Loudness is measured in units called decibels. One decibel is the lowest sound that the average person can hear. Sounds up to 80 decibels ge nerally aren’t harmful, that’s noise like traffic on a busy street. But anything louder than 80 decibels, esp. with continuou s exposure, may eventually hurt your hearing. Once you’re up to around 140 decibels, that’s like a jet plane taking off, then y ou might even feel pain in your ears. And pains are sure sign that your hearing is at risk. Even one exposure to a really loud noise at close
range can cause hearing loss. So what you need to do is limit your exposure to harmful levels. If you pass along this hand-out, we can take a look at the decibel level of some common campus sounds. Notice how loud those horns are that people take to football games. They are really dangerous if blown right behind you. Now, let’s try to genera te a list of damaging noises.
演讲听写训练 2
Continuing our survey of the 19th century, let’s take a look now at Harriet Beecher Stowe. Now Stowe is best known for her no vel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that details the harshness of plantation life in the south. The book was extremely popular in the United States as well as in other countries. Ironically though, for the attention given to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is far from Stowe’s best work. She did write one other novel about life in the south. But much of her best work has nothing to do with the south at all. In fact, Stowe’s best writing is about village life in the New England states in the 19th century. In recording the customs of the vil lages she wrote about, Stowe claimed that her purpose was to reflect the images as realistically as possible. She usually succeeded, for her settings were often described actually and in detail. In this sense, she was an important forerunner to the realistic movement that became popular later in the 19th century. She was one of the first writers to use local dialect for her characters when they spoke. And she did this for thirty years before Mark Twain popularized the use of local dialect. It makes sense that Stowe would write about New England life, since she was born in Connecticut. As a young woman there, she worked as a teacher. The teaching job helped lead to her first published work, a geography book for children. Later, when she was married, her writing helped to support her family financially. Throughout her life, she wrote poems, travel books, biographic al sketches and children’s books as well as novels for adults.
演讲听写训练 3
Where did the term Piggy Bank come from? Today the simple piggy bank is seen everywhere as the symbol of saving and frugality, for putting away funds for a rainy day, or building a nest egg for life’s sudden money needs, such as paying college exp enses, buying a home, or financing retirement. But why a pig? Dogs bury bones for a rainy day. Why not a dog shaped bank for coins? Squirrels are well known hoarders too and we talk about squirreling away valuables. Why not a bank in the shape of a squirrel? Well nevertheless, for 300 years, children’s banks have been imitation pigs with slots in the back. Charles Bernardy, the author of Extraordinar y Origins of Everyday Things, tells how the symbol came about by coincidence. According to Bernardy, during the middle ages, mined metal was scarce and expensive, therefore was rarely used in the manufacture of household utensils. The type of orange clay, known of pygg, spelt p-y-g-g, was more abundant and economical throughout western Europe. It was used in making dishes, cups, pots and jars. And so these earthenware items were referred to as pygg. Frugal people saved cash in kitchen pots and jars. Although a pygg jar was not originally shaped like a pig, the name persisted. However by the 18th century, pygg, p-y-g-g jar became pig, p-i-g jar or pig bank. Potters had simply begun to cast the bank in the shape of its common name. In the United States, the popular piggy bank has always been a symbol of saving money.
99年8月：
演讲听写训练 1
To get us started this semester, I'm going to spend the first two classes giving you background lectures about some basic cinematic concepts. Once you are a little more familiar with basic film terminology, we will be ready to look at the history of movies in the United States. You will b e expected to attend showings of films on Tuesday evening at 7 o’clock at Jennings Auditorium, that’s our lab. Then during our Wednesday seminar, we will discuss in depth the movie we saw the night before. We’re not covering silent films in this course. We will begin with the first talking motion picture, The Jazz Singer, released in 1927. The next week we’ll be looking at The Gold Digger of 1933, a piece that is very representative of the escapist trend in films released during the Depression. Some of the films we will be watching will probably be new to you, like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight. Others you might have already seen on TV, like Rebel Without a Cause starring James Deane, or Stanley Cooper’s Doctor’s Strange Love. However, I hope you w ill see even familiar films with new eyes. In the last three weeks of the course, we will be watching films from the 1980s, and you will choose one of them as the subject for an extensive written critique. We will talk more about the requirements of the critique later in the semester.
演讲听写训练 2
Welcome to our aquarium. As we begin our tour, the first animal we will see today is the starfish. You probably have seen pictures of the starfish, but in a few minutes you will see some live ones and learn a little about their structure and life cycle. First of all, starfish are not really fish, they belong to the family of echinoderms which are spiny skinned sea animal, that is, their skin is covered with thorny bumps. Most starfish have five arm-like extensions on their bodies. And so they look like a five-pointed star. But some other kinds have as many as 40 or more arms. Starfish, like other members of the echinoderm family, have what’s called radial symme try.
All that means is that the body part of these animals are arranged around the center, kind of like spokes of a wheel around a hub. One of the special features of the starfish is that it can drop off arms as a defensive reaction, to get away from an attacker, for example. They can then grow new arms to replace the old ones. Starfish reproduce by releasing eggs into the sea. These eggs develop into larvae, and can swim freely. These early forms, which are what larvae are, differ from adult starfish, because the larvae have bilateral symmetry. That means that the two halves of the larvae look exactly the same, which makes them look a lot different from the later form of the starfish. Eventually the larvae sink to the ocean bottom and change into the adult radial form. If you don’t have questions, we will go in now and see some of the creatures in person.
演讲听写训练 3
Last time we outlined how the Civil War finally got started. I want to talk today about the political management of the war on both sides, the north under Abraham Lincoln, and the south under Jefferson Davis. An important task for both of these presidents was to justify for their citizens just why the war was necessary. In 1861, on July 4th, Lincoln gave his first major speech in which he presented the northern reasons for the war. It was, he said, to preserve democracy. Lincoln suggested that this war was a noble crusade that would determine the future of democracy throughout the world. For him, the issue was whether or not this government of the people, by the people could maintain its integrity, could it remain complete and survive its domestic foes? In other words, could a few discontented individuals and by that he meant those who led the southern rebellion, could they arbitrarily break up the government and put an end to free government on earth? The only way for the nation to survive was to crash the rebellion. At the time, he was hopeful that the war wouldn’t last long, and the slave owners would be put down forever. But h e underestimated how difficult the war would be. It would be harder than any the Americans had thought before or since, largely because the north had to break the will of the southern people, not just by its army. But Lincoln rallied northerners to a deep commitment to the cause. They came to perceive the war as a kind of democratic crusade against southern society.
99年5月：
演讲1：
Today, we’re going to take a look at the development of the skyscraper. We’ll start with some buildings in Chicago. One of th e circumstances that let Chicago to become home to some of the buildings now considered the prototypes for later skyscrapers was this: in 1871, there was a great fire that destroyed much of the city. It was that tragic fire that cleared the way for a new kind of city that used the new building techniques and new materials developed during the 1800’s. One of these new structures was the Home Insurance Building, completed in 1885. It was ten stories high. Now granted, that’s no higher than some of the early skyscrap ers in New York City. What makes Chicago’s Home Insurance Building important is that it had true skyscraper construction with an internal metal skeleton that carried the weight of the brick exterior. This metal-support system, along with the early development of the elevator, were the two innovations that made the later very tall industrial buildings possible. Chicago’s Reli ance Building was another important building in the development of the skyscraper. It showed the architects’ understanding of the possibilities of metal-frame construction. By eliminating walls and opening up the sides as a glass box. It was the first expression of the skyscraper as a glass-shelf framed in a metal grid.
演讲2：
It was an Italian inventor who created the first wireless device for sending out radio signals in 1895. But not until the American inventor Lee De Forest built the first amplifying vacuum tube in 1906 did we get the first radio as we know it. And the first actual radio broadcast was made on Christmas Eve of 1906. That’s when someone working from an experimental station in Brand Rock, Massachusetts, arranged the program of two short musical selections of poem and brief holiday greeting. The broadcast was heard by wireless operators on ships with a radio through several hundred miles. The following year, De Forest began regular radio broadcasts in New York. These programs were similar to much of what we hear on the radio today in that De Forest played only music. But because there was still no home radio receivers, De Forest’s audience consisted of only wireless operators on ship s in New York harbor. There is no doubt that radio broadcasting was quite a novelty in those days. But it took a while to catch on commercially. Why? Hmm, for the simple fact that only a few people, in fact, only those who tinkered with wireless telegraphs as a hobby owned receivers. It wasn’t until the 1920’s that so meone envisioned mass appeal for radio. This was radio pioneer, David Sarnoff who predicted that one day there would be a radio receiver in every home.
演讲3：
The origin of earth’s moon, the largest moon in the solar system, is still something of a mystery. There are some theories about its origin, however. Now, keep in mind that a theory of the moon’s origin has to be consistent with two important facts. The firs t fact is that the earth contains a lot of iron, most of it has an iron core. But the moon contains practically no iron. The second fact is that,
other than the difference in iron content, the moon and earth are composed of essentially the same minerals, a similarity not shared with any other planet or moon in our solar system. One of the earliest the ories of the moon’s origin, I call it the Capture Theory, proposes that the moon was somehow captured by earth’s gravitational force. This theory is improbable, however, because it assumes that the moon and earth formed in different parts of the solar syst em. If this were true, you would expect the moon’s composition to be much different from earth’s composition, just as all the other planets in the solar system are so different from earth. A second theory of the moon’s origin is more promising. It is somet imes referred to as the Mars Theory because according to this theory, when earth was still molten, it was struck by a planet about the size of Mars. The impact caused the cores of the two planets to melt together and chunks of earth’s crust to be thrown ou t into space. These chunks came together to form the moon. Now remember, earth’s crust is low in iron because the iron is in earth’s core but high in various other minerals. This then accounts for why there is little iron but lots of other minerals on the moon
99年1月：
演讲听写训练 1
As you probably know, log structures are gaining popularity. They are no longer just the simple country homes that we think of as the traditional log cabin. Some upscale homes now incorporate natural round logs in sealing beams and walls. People seem to think that the rounded logs give their homes a cozy warm atmosphere. And even people who want to build a traditional log cabin on their own can buy a kits
with precut logs that fit together like pieces of jigsaw puzzle. Before showing y ou some slides of modern log houses, I’d like to give you a little historical background on the subject.
Log cabins were first built in the late 1600s along the Delaware river valley. The European immigrants who settled there brought centuries’ old tradit ions of working with logs. And in this heavily wooded area logs were the material in hand. Log cabins were the most popular in the early 1800s with the settlers who were moving west. They provided the answer to the pioneer’s need for a safe and sturdy home that an ordinary family could build quickly. They had dirt floors and sliding boards for windows. But the log buildings that have probably had most influence on modern architects are those of the mountain retreats of wealthy New Yorkers. These country hou ses which were popular in the early 1900s typify what’s known as the Adoroundyx style. Now let’s loo k at those slides.
演讲听写训练 2
The old kind of road is a long lost trail between the Canadian province of Quebec and Maine in the northeast corner of the United States. Yes it really was lost and finding it again was a complex process that involved state of our technology: how the location of the roads was pinpointed was very interesting. And I’ll return to it as soon as I gave you a little background informati on. The road was begun in 1817, a few years before Maine even became a state. At the time Quebec was a major market for livestock, crops and fish. So a road to Quebec was seen by officials in Maine as necessary for trade. For about 20 years the movement of people and goods was mostly from Maine to Quebec, and then the trend reversed as thousands of Canadians immigrated to Maine to escape poor crops, the lack of jobs and the threat of disease. I think it was a color epidemic. Besides its negative reasons major building projects in Maine also made the state very attractive for the Canadians who needed work. I should stress though that immigration during that period went in both directions. In fact the flow of people and goods went completely unhindered. There wasn’t even a border post until around 1850. The people of the time saw Maine and Quebec as a single region mainly because of the strong French influence which is still evident in Maine today. Eventually the road fell into disuse as a major railway was completed. Finally people simply forgot about it and that’s how it came to be lost. This brings me b ack to the original topic
演讲听写训练 3
OK, in the last class we talked about the classification of trees and we ended up with a basic description of angiosperm. You remember that those are plants with true flowers and seeds that develop inside fruits. The common broad leaf trees we have on campus fall into this category. But our pines don’t. Now I hope you all followed my advice and wore comfortable shoes because as I said today we are going to do a little field study. To get started let me describe a couple of broadleaf trees we have i n front of us. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that this big tree next to Brand Hall. It’s a black walnut that must be 80 feet tall. As a matter of fact there is a plaque identifying it is the tallest black walnut in the state. And from here we can see the beautiful archway of trees at the commons. They are American elms. The ones along the commons were planted when the college was founded 120 years ago. They have distinctive dark green leaves that look lopsided because the two sides of the leaf are unequal. I want you to notice the elm right outside the Jackson Hall. Some of the leaves have withered and turned yellow, maybe due to Dutch elm disease. Only a few branches seem affective so far but if this tree is sick it’ll have to be cut down. Well, let’s move on and I’ll describe what we see as we
go.
98年10月：
演讲听写训练 1
Before moving on to a new topic, I want to finish up our unit on a rag nit, by looking at what may seem a very unusual aspect of spider behavior—a species where the young spiders actually consume the body of their mother. Unlike most other spiders this species lays one and only one-clutch of forty eggs in a life time. The young spiders hatch in mid-spring or early summer inside a nest of eucalyptus leaves. Their mother spends the warm summer months bringing home large insects, often ten times their weight for meals. The catch is always significantly more than her young spiders can eat. So the mother fattens herself up on this extra prey, and stores the nutrients in her extra unfertilized eggs. As th e weather turns colder, there are fewer insect prey hunt. That’s when the nutrients stored in those extra eggs begin to seep into the mother’s blood stream. So when there are no more insects to feed to the young spiders, they attach themselves to the mothe r’s leg joints and draw nourishment by sucking the nutrient-rich blood. After several weeks, the mother is depleted of all nutrients and she dies. But then how do the young get nourishment? They start to feed on one another. Now if you recall our discussio n of Darwin, you’ll see the evolutionary value of this. Only the strongest spiders of the clutch will survive this cannibalism. And the mother spider will ensure that her genes have an increased chance of survival through future generations.
演讲听写训练 2
Movi ng away from newspapers, let’s now focus on magazines. Now the first magazine was a little periodical called the Review, and it was started in London in 1704. It looked a lot like the newspapers of the time. But in terms of its content, it was much different. Newspapers were concerned mainly with news events, but the Review focussed on important domestic issues of the day, as well as the policies of the government. Now in England at the time, people could still be thrown in jail for publishing articles that were critical of the king. And that’s what happened to Dannial Defoe. He was the outspoken founder of the Review. Defoe actually w rote the first issue of the review from prison. You see, he had been arrested because of his writings that criticized the policies of the Church of England, which was headed by the king. After his release, Defoe continued to produce the Review and the magazine started to appear on a more frequent schedule, about three times a week, it didn’t take long for other magazines to star t popping up. In 1709. a magazine called the Tattler began publication. This new magazine contained a mixture of news, poetry, political analysis, and philosophical essays.
演讲听写训练 3
There is an art exhibition here on campus which ties well with discussion s we’ve had about folk art. It’s an exhibition of wild life art calendars from about a hundred years ago. Like most other folk art, the calendar pictures were not considered to be art in their own day. People just thought of them as a way of decorating a practical object. In fact. the calendar pictures were originally printed as advertising for various companies that made hunting or fishing products, like guns or fishing rods. The calendars were handed out free to customers to thank them for their business. Most people just hung the calendars on their walls where the picture faded in the sun and then tore the pictures off the calendar as each month passed. As a result, collectors today place a lot of value on calendars that are complete and in good condition. Even though the people who used the calendars didn’t regard them as art, the original paintings the prints were made for were often of good quality. In fact, many famous wild life painters created calendar art at some point in their lives. To them, it was a way of getting their work reproduced and shown around. One aspect of the exhibit that I find very interesting is the way these pictures reflect changing attitudes toward wild life. The pictures in the exhibit often portray the thrill and adventure of h unting rather than any particular concern for wild life preservation. But most of today’s wild life art shows animals in their natural surroundings without any humans in the scene. This modern wild life art appeals to large numbers of nature lovers, even those who oppose the practice of hunting.
98年8月（北美）：
演讲听写训练 1
(man) Community service is an important component of education here at our university. We encourage all students to volunteer for at least one community activity before they graduate. A new comm unity program called “One On One” helps elementary students who’ve fallen behind. You education majors might be especially interested in it because it offers the opportunity to do some teaching—that is, tutoring in math and English.
You’d have to voluntee r two hours a week for one semester. You can choose to help a child with math, English, or both. Half-hour lessons are fine, so you could do a half hour of each subject two days a week.
Professor Dodge will act as a mentor to the tutors—he’ll be available to help you with lesson plans or to offer suggestions for activities. He has office hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. You can sign up for the program with him and begin the tutoring next week.
I’m sure you’ll enjoy this community service…and you’ll gain valuable experience at the same time. It looks good on your resume, too—showing that you’ve had experience with children and that you care about your community. If you’d like to sign up, or if you have any questions, stop by Profes sor Dodge’s offi ce this week.
演讲听写训练 2
(woman) I hope you’ve all finished reading the assigned chapter on insurance—so that you’re prepared for out discussion today. But, before we start. I’d like to mention a few things your text doesn’t go into.
It’s interesting to no te that insurance has existed in some form for a very long time. The carliest insurance policies were what were called bottomry contracts. They provided shipping protection for merchants as far back as 3000 B.C.
In general, the contracts were often no more than verbal agreements. They granted loans to merchants with the understanding that if a particular shipment of goods was lost at sea, the loan didn’t have to be repaid. Interest on the loans varied according to how risky it was to transport the goods. During periods of heavy piracy at sea, for example, the amount of interest and the cost of the policy went up considerably.
So, you can see how insurance helped encourage international trade. Even the most cautious merchants became willing to risk shipping their goods over long distances—not to mention in hazardous weather conditions—when they had this kind of protection available.
Generally speaking, the basic form of an insurance policy has been pretty much the same since the Middle Ages. There are four points that were salient then and remain paramount in all policies today. These were outlined in chapter six and will serve as the basis for the rest of today’s discussion. Can anyone tell me what o ne of those points might be?
演讲听写训练 3
(man)Located at the NASA Research Center in Iowa is a 5,000 gallon vat of water, and inside the
tank is an underwater treadmill designed by Dava Newman, an aerospace engineer. For four years Newman observed scuba divers as they simulated walking on the Moon and on Mars on her underwater moving bell. She wanted to discover how the gravity of the Moon and of Mars would affect human movement.
To do this, Newman attached weights to the divers and then lowered them into the tank and onto the treadmill. These weights were carefully adjusted so that the divers could experience the underwater gravity of the Moon and of Mars as they walked on the treadmill. Newman concluded that walking on Mars will probably be easier than walking on the Moon. The Moon has less gravity than Mars does. so at lunar gravity, the divers struggled to keep their balance and walked awkwardly. But at Martian gravity the divers had grater traction and stability and could easily adjust to a pace of 1.5 miles per hour. As Newman gradually increased the speed of the treadmill, the divers took longer, graceful strides until they comfortably settled into an even quicker pace. Newman also noted that at Martian gravity, the divers needed less oxygen.
The data Newman collected will help in the future design of Martian space suits. Compared to lunar space suits, Martian space suits will require smaller air tanks; and. to allow for freer movement; the elbow and knee areas of the space suits will also be altered.
98年8月：
演讲听写训练 1
I was really glad when your club invited me to share my coin collection. It’s been my passion since I collected my first Linc oln cent in 1971. That is the current penny with Abraham Lincoln’s image. Just a little history before I started my o wn collection. Lincoln pennies are made of copper and they were the first the United States coins to bear the likeness of the president. It was back in 1909 when the country was celebrating the centennial of Lincoln’s birth than 1809 that the decision was made to redesign the one-cent piece in his honor. Before that, the penny had an American Indian head on it. The new penny was designed by artist Victor David Braner. This is interesting because he put his initials VDB on the reverse of the coin as the original design. There was a general uproar when the initials were discovered. And only a limited number of coins were struck with the initials on them. Today a penny with the initials from a San Francisco mint called the 1909s’ VDB is worth over 500 dollars. Now when I started my coin collection, I began with penny for several reasons. There were a lot of them, several hundred billion were minted and there were a lot of people collecting them. So I have plenty of people to trade with and talk to about my collection. Also it was the coin I could afford to collect as a young teenager. In the twenty-five years since then, I have managed to acquire over three hundred coins; some of them are very rare. I will be sharing with you today some of my rare specimen includ ing the 1909s’ VDB.
演讲听写训练 2
Today I want to talk to you about wasps and their nests. You’ll recall the biologist divide species of wasps into two groups: solitary and social. Solitary wasps as the name implies do not live together with other wasps. In most species the male and female get together only to mate and then the female does all the work of building the nest and providing the food for the offspring by herself. Solitary wasps usually make nests in the ground and they separate the chambers for the individual offspring with bits of grass, stone or mud, whatever is handy. What about social wasps? They form a community and work together to build and maintain the nest. A nest begins in the spring when the fertile female called the queen builds the first few compartments in the nest and lay eggs. The first offspring are small females but cannot lay eggs. These females called workers. They build a lot of new compartments and the queen lays more eggs. They also care for the new offspring and defend the nest with their stingers. By the way only the female wasps have stingers. Most social wasps make nest of paper. The female produces the paper by chewing up plant fibers or old wood. They spread the papers in thin layers to make cells, in which the queen lays her eggs. Most of you I’m sure have seen these nests suspended from trees. They may also be built under the ground in abandoned rodent burrows.
演讲听写训练 3
One of the most popular myths about the United States in the 19th Century was that of the free and simple life of the farmer. It was said that the farmers worked hard on their own land to produce whatever their families’ needed. They might sometimes trade wi th their neighbors, but in general they could get along just fine by relying on themselves, not on commercial ties with others. This is how Thomas Jefferson idealized the farmer at the beginning of the 19th century. And at that time, this may have been close to the truth especially on the frontier. But by the mid century sweeping changes in agriculture were well under way as farmers began to specialize in the raising of crops such as cotton or corn or wheat. By late in the century revolutionary advances in farm machinery has vastly increased production of specialized crops and extensive network of railroads had linked farmers throughout the country to markets in the east and even overseas. By raising and selling specialized crops, farmers could afford more and finer goods and achieved a much higher standard of living but at a price. Now farmers were no longer dependent just on the weather and their own efforts, their lives were increasing controlled by banks, which had powder to grant or deny loans for new machinery, and by the railroads which set the rates for shipping their crops to market. As businessmen, farmers now had to worry about national economic depressions and the influence of world supply and demand on, for example, the price of wheat in Kansas. And so by the end of the 19th century, the era of Jefferson’s independent farmer had come to a close.
98年5月：
演讲训练1文字答案
A museum guide talking about native American pottery.
Hello, I'll be your tour guide today here at the art museum so I'd like to welcome you to this month's exhibit of native American pottery. We'll begin our tour in a few minutes. But first I'm going to tell you something about the way this pottery was created. Pottery was made all over ancient North America by many different groups of people. One of the earliest of these ancient American cultures was the Hohokam people. They lived in what is now Arizona from about 300 BC to AD 1500. And it's their pottery that you will be looking at today. All of the pottery was made from clay. Some objects were mug, bowls and ladies for drinking and eating. You will also see finger rings and animal-shaped incense burners which we believe were probably used in special ritual. The Hohokam formed their pottery vessels from coils of clay. Then shaped them with special tools to create very thin sides on the vessels. Afterwards they painted the pottery with red design. Actually many of the pieces here have designs right on them that show how the pottery was used. Now I hope you'll enjoy the beauty and the uniqueness of the Hohokam pottery and that will give you some interesting insights about the people who created it. Please feel free to ask me any questions and thank you for joining us today.
演讲听写训练 2
I’m going to introduce two current points of view about the motivation for writing the United States Constitution back in 1787. The first one is called the idealist view. The idealists basically believe that the writers of the Constitution were motivated by ideas. Which ideas? The ideas of the revolutionary war, such as liberty and democracy. The idealists remind that the young country had a lot of problems: an economic depression, a large war debts, lawlessness and trade barriers between the states. They argue that the representatives needed to control these problems in order for the United States to survive. The other point of view is the economic view. The economic view is that the writers of the Constitution were concerned about their own financial interests. According to them most people were living wealth for the wealthiest people were afraid of losing their money. The writers wanted a strong central government that would promote trade protect private property and perhaps most of all collect taxes to pay off the United
States’ large war debts. Because a number of those who wrote the constitution had loaned money to the government during the revolution. Which view is correct? Well , historians who wrote during the calm and prosperous 1950s found reasons to believe the idealist view. Those who wrote during the trouble of 1960s found support for the economic viewpoint. I’d say that neither vie w is complete, both the idealist and the economic perspective contribute a part to the whole picture.
演讲听写训练 3
Many egg-laying animals merely lay their eggs and leave. Turtles, for instance, and horseshoe crabs .The eggs hatch, and the little ones are on their own. The current theory about birds is that the earliest birds did just that when they were cold-blooded creatures living in warm places. However when they became warm-blooded creatures living in cold places they had to remain on the eggs to keep them warm. The process we call incubation. For this they needed a place a nest. Very likely the first nests were just primitive depressions scrape into the ground. Even now many species still lay eggs in this sort of crude nests. In fact every spring a mother killdeer lays her legs in some pebbles along the edge of the parking lot just outside this building. Primitive nests on the ground were fine for some birds but others began to elevate their nests in branches perhaps to avoid predators. These early elevated nests were probably loose platforms of sticks and twigs the types still built by ospreys and most Arians today. The latest evolvement in nest the most recent version, so to speak is the cup—shaped nest. This is the one we regard today as the typical bird’s nest, you know, like a robin’s nest.
98年1月：
演讲听写训练 1
By the end of the term I hope you'll be convinced as I am that formal writing always requires revision. Sometimes it requires a fairly major rewriting of the paper. Some students may have the mistaken idea that revision means simply making corrections in spelling and grammar. I call that proofreading. What I expect you to do is you revise, is to evaluate and improve the overall effectiveness of your paper. But how can you tell if your paper is effective? Well, for example, start by asking yourself these questions: Is the topic restricted enough to be fully discussed within the given links? Are the main ideas clear? Are they supported by the specific details in the examples? Do they move smoothly from one idea to the next? You'll need enough time for a possible major overhaul, that is, you may have to make a lot of changes before your paper becomes really clear to the reader. So I'll expect a preliminary draft of each paper two weeks before the final due date. That way I can critisize it and get it back in time for you to revise it. Then you can submit it a final draft for grading. This process may seem like a great deal of trouble at first but I think you will find it valuable. In fact after you finish this course I doubt that you will ever turn in a term paper without first revising it carefully.
演讲听写训练 2
Our electric car is the way of the future. Automobile manufactures are under the pressure to develop cars that do not pollute. One powerful motive is a California law requiring that by the year 2000 10% of the new car sales in the state be so-called zero emission vehicles. These cars must put no pollutants whatsoever into the atmosphere. California is a huge market for the automobile companies. So they are working hard to meet this standards. So far the electric car seems to be the best alternative. So the biggest advantage of electric cars is that they don't pollute. However they will be in competition with gas powered cars . And that's where the witnesses come out. The big problem is that the batteries in electric cars weigh a lot relative to the amount of power they deliver. For instance in one electric car the batteries weigh four hundred kilograms and they provide enough energy to go 250 km before recharging, which take 8 hours. Compare that to a moderately fuel-efficient conventional car it can go 400-700 km on a tank of gas. And refilling takes just minutes. If there are other drains on an electric car's batteries besides a motor, headlights, air-conditioning or a heater, its already limited range would be significantly reduced. So automobile engineers are trying to make more powerful batteries that would increase the car's range and make them more attractive to buyers.
演讲听写训练 3
I'd like to welcome you all to the museum of natural history. Today's tour will take us through our newly-renovated dinosaur exhibit, where we have the largest collection of dinosaur fossils anywhere in the world. Before we begin the tour let me mention that there have been some major modifications to some of the exhibits over the past three years. Basically these changes were made because of the recent changes in the way scientists interpret dinosaur behavior. For example, when we get to the first room, you will be able to see that tyrannosaurus rex skeleton is no longer standing upright with its tail dragging on the floor. That's because paleontologists, as they examine the area around its footprints more closely, realized they could find no evidence of a heavy dragging tail, which would have left behind marks in the earth. In its new position, the backbone is parallel to the floor, its head is pushed forward and its tail is stretched out acting as a counterweight. This new pose stresses the relationship between dinosaurs and modern birds and supports the theory that dinosaurs are actually more closely related to birds than to any other existing creature. Let me also point
out that we have changed the way we group dinosaurs in our displays. There is a new school of thought called kledistics where scientists determine relationships among the animals according to common physical characteristics. The plateosaurus and the ovirapter, for instance, are separated by 148 million years, but they are grouped together here because they both have a grassbean forefoot and its S-shaped neck. Physical evidence that they are indeed related. So now the exhibition halls are arranged more like a family tree rather than the walk-through tine that they used to be.
97年12月：
演讲听写训练 1
Today we are going to practice evaluating the main tool used when addressing groups ---the voice. There are three main elements that combine to create either a positive or negative experience for listeners. They can result in a voice that is pleasing to listen to and can be used effectively, or they can create a voic e that doesn’t hold the attention, or even worse causes an adverse reaction. The three elements are volume, pitch and pace. When evaluating volume, keep in mind that a good speaker will adjust to the size of both the room and the audience. Of course, with an amplifying device like a microphone, the speaker can use a natural tone. But speaker should not be dependent on microphones. A good speaker can speak loudly without shouting. The second element---pitch is related to the highness and lowness of the sounds. High pitches are for most people more difficult to listen to so in general speaker should use the lower registers of their voice. During a presentation, it’s important to vary pitch to some extent in order to maintain interest. The third element, pace, that is how fast or slow words and sounds are articulated should also be varied. A slower pace can be used to emphasize important points. Note that the time spent not speaking can be meaningful too. Pauses ought to be used to signal transitions or create anticipation. Because a pause gives the listener time to think about what was just said or even to predict what might come next, it can be very affective when moving from one topic to another. What I like you to do now is watch and listen to a video tape and use the forms I gave you to rate the speaking voices you hear. Then tonight I want you to go home and read a passage into a tape-recorder and evaluate your own voice.
演讲听写训练 2
Let’s perceive to the main exhibit hall and look at some of the actual vehicl es that played a prominent role in speeding up mail delivery. Consider how long it used to take to send a letter across a relatively short distance. Back in the 1600s it took two weeks on horseback to get a letter from Boston to New York, a distance of about 260 miles. Crossing a river was also a challenge. Ferry service was so irregular that a carrier would sometimes wait hours just to catch a ferry. For journeys inland there was always a stagecoach but the ride was by no means comfortable because it had to be shared with other passengers. The post office was pretty ingenious about some words. In the 19th century, in the southwestern desert, for an instance, camels were brought in to help to get the mail through. In Alaska, reindeer were used. This practic e was discontinued because of the disagreeable temper of these animals. We’ll stop here a minute so that you can enter this replica of a railway mail car. It was during the age of the iron horse that delivery really started to pick up. In fact the United S tates transported most bulk of mail by train for nearly 100 years. The first airmail service didn’t start until 1918. Please take a few moments to look around. I hope you’ll enjoy your tour. And as you continue on your own, m ay I suggest you visit our impr essive philatelic collection? Not only can you look at some of the more unusual stamps issued but there’s an interesting exhibit on how stamps are made.
演讲听写训练 3
Most people think of astronomers as people who spend their time in cold observatories peering through telescopes every night. In fact a typical astronomer spends most of his/her time analyzing data and may only be at the telescope a few weeks of the year. Some astronomers work on purely theoretical problems and never use a telescope at all. You might not know how rarely images are view directly through telescopes. The most common way to observe the skies is to photograph them. The process is very simple. First a photographic plate is coated with a light-sensitive material. The plate is positioned so that the image received by the telescope is recorded on it. Then the image can be developed, enlarged and published so that many people can study it. Because most astronomical objects are very remote the light we receive from them is rather feeble. But by using a telescope as a camera, long time exposures can be made. In this way objects can be photographed that are a hundred times too faint to be seen by just looking through a telescope.
97年10月：
演讲听写训练 1
So-uh- as Jim said, James Polk was the eleventh president. And, well, my report's about the next president Zachary Taylor. Taylor was
elected in 1849, it's surprising because he was the first president that didn't have any previous political experience. The main reason he was chosen as a candidate was because he was a war hero. In the army, his man called him Old Rough and Ready. I guess because his rough edges. He was kind of blunt and didn't really look like a military hero. He liked to do things like wearing civilian clothes instead of uniform even in battle. And he was so short and plump that he had to be lifted up on to his horse. But he did win a lot of battles and he became more and more popular. So the Whig party decided to nominated him for the presidency even though no one knew anything about where he stood on the issues. I couldn't find much about his accomplishments probably because he was only in office about a year and half before he died. But one thing he pushed for the development of transcontinental railroad because he thought it was important form a link with the west coast. There was a lot of wealth in California and Oregon from commerce and minerals and stuff. Also he established an agricultural bureau in the department of the Interior and promoted more government aid to agriculture. Well, that's about all I found. Like I said, he died in office in 1850, so his vice president took over. And that's the next report. So thank you.
演讲听写训练 2
I want to welcome each and every balloon enthusiast in Philadelphia. Thank you for coming here this morning to commemorate the first balloon voyage in the United States. On January 9th, 1793, at 10 o'clock in the morning, a silk balloon lifted into the skies above this city, which was at that time the capital of the country. According to the original records of the flight, the voyage lasted 46 minutes, from its departure in Philadelphia to its landing across the Delaware river in New Jersey. Though our pilots today will try to approximate the original landing site, they are at the mercy of the winds. So who knows where they will drift off to. Even the balloonist in 1793 experienced some uncertain weather that day, there were clouds, fog and mist in various directions. Our reenactment promises to be nothing less than spectacular. The yellow balloon directly behind me is 5 stories high. It's inflated with helium unlike the original, which was filled with hydrogen and unbeknownst to the pilot, potentially explosive. Gas filled models are pretty uncommon now because of the extremely high cost so the 80 other balloons in today's launch are hot air, heated by propane burners. These balloons are from all over the country.
演讲听写训练 3
I'm glad you've brought up the question of our investigations into the makeup of the earth's interior. In fact since this is the topic in your reading assignment for next time, let me spend these last few minutes of class talking about it. There were several important discoveries in the early part of this century that helped geologists develop a more accurate picture of the earth's interior. The first key discovery had to do with seismic waves. Remember they are the vibrations caused by earthquakes. Well, scientists found that they travel thousands of miles through the earth's interior. This finding enabled geologists to study the inner parts of the earth. You see, the studies revealed that these vibrations were of two types: compression or P waves and shear or S waves. And researchers found that P waves travel through both liquids and solids while S waves travel only through solid matter. In 1906, a British geologist discovered that P waves slowed down at certain depth but kept traveling deeper. On the other hand, S waves either disappeared or were reflected back. So he concluded that the depth marked the boundary between a solid mantle and a liquid core. Three years later, another boundary was discovered that between the mantle and the earth's crust. There are still a lot to be learned about the earth. For instance, geologists know that the core is hot. Evidence of this is the molten lava that flows out of the volcanoes. But we are still not sure what source of the heat is.
97年8月：
演讲听写训练 1
Welcome to the Forewinds historical farm where traditions of the past are preserved for visitors like you. Today our master thatchers will begin giving this barn behind me a sturdy thatched roof able to withstand heavy wind and last to 100 years. How do they do it? Well, in a nutshell, thatching involves covering the beams or rafters, the wooden skeleton of the roof, with reeds or straw. Our thatchers here have harvested their own natural materials for the job the bundles of water reeds you see lying over there beside the barn. Thatching is certainly uncommon in the United States today. I guess that's why so many of you have come to see this demonstration. But it wasn't always that way. In the 17th century, the colonists here thatched their roofs with reeds and straw just as they'd done in England. After a while though they began to replace the thatch with wooden shingles because woods were so plentiful. And eventually other roofing materials like stone, slate and clay tiles came into use. It's a real shame that most people today don't realize how strong and long-lasting a thatched roof is. In Ireland where thatching is still practiced, the roof can survive winds up to 110 miles per hour. That's because straw and reeds are so flexible they bend but don't break in the wind like other materials can. Another advantage is that the roofs keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And then of course there's the roof's longevity. The average is 60 years but they can last up to 100. With all these reasons to start thatching roofs again,
wouldn't it be wonderful to see this disappearing craft return to popularity?
演讲听写训练 2
A lot of people in the United States are coffee drinkers. Over the last few years, a trend has been developing to introduce premium specially blended coffees known as gourmet coffees into the America market. Boston seems to have been the birthplace of this trend. In fact major gourmet coffee merchants from other cities like Seattle, San Francisco, came to Boston where today they are engaged in a kind of coffee war with Boston's merchants. They are all competing for a significant share of the gourmet coffee market. Surprisingly the competition among these leading gourmet coffee businesses will not hurt any of them. Experts predict that the gourmet coffee market in the United States is growing and will continue to grow to the point that gourmet coffee will soon capture a half of what is now a 1.5 million-dollar market and will be an eight million dollar market by 1999. Studies have shown that coffee drinkers who convert to gourmet coffee seldomgo back to the regular brands found in supermarkets. As a result these brands will be the real losers in the gourmet coffee competition.
演讲听写训练 3
You may remember that a few weeks ago we discussed the question of what photography is. Is it art or is it a method of reproducing images? Does photograph belong to museum or just in our homes? Today I want to talk about a person who tried to make his professional life an answer to such questions. Alfred Stieglitz went from the United States to Germany to study engineering. While he was there he became interested in photography and began to experiment with his camera. He to ok pictures under conditions that most photographers considered too difficult. He took them at night, in the rain and of people and objects reflected in windows. When he returned to the United States he continued this revolutionary effort. Stieglitz was the first person to photograph skyscrapers, clouds and views from an airplane. What Stieglitz was trying to do in his photographs was what he tried to do throughout his lifemake photography an art. He thought that photography could be just as beautiful a form of self-expression as painting or drawing. For Stieglitz, his camera was his brush. While many photographers in the late 1800s and early 1900s thought of their work as a reproduction of identical images, Stieglitz saw his as creative art form. He understood the power of the camera to capture the moment. In fact he never retouched his prints or made copies of them. If you are in this class from today, I'm sure you'd say: Well, painters don't normally make extra copies of their paintings, do they?
97年5月：
演讲听写训练 1
Welcome to Everglade National Park. The Everglade is a watery plain covered with saw grass that's home to numerous species of plants and wild life. And one and a half million acre is too big to see it all today, but this tour will offer you a good sampling. Our tour bus will stop first at Tailor Slue. This is a good place to start because it is home to many plants and animals typically associated with The Everglade. You will see many exotic birds and of course the world famous alligators. Don't worry there's a border walk that goes across the marsh so you can look down at the animals in the water from a safe distance. The border walk is high enough to give you a great view of saw grass quarry. From there we'll head for some other marshy and even jungle-like areas that feature wonderful tropical plant life. For those of you who'd like a closer view of saw grass quarry, you might consider running a canoe sometime during your visit here. However don't do this unless you have a very good sense of direction and can negotiate your way through tall grass. We hate to have to come looking for you. You have a good fortune of being here in winter, the best time of the year to visit. During the spring and summer, the mosquitoes were just about to eat you alive. Right now they are not so bothersome but you will still want to use insect repellent.
演讲听写训练 2
Thank you. It's great to see so many of you interested in this series on survival in outer space. Please excuse the cameras. We are being video taped for the local TV stations. Tonight I'm going to talk about the most basic aspect of survival: the space suit. When most of you imagine an astronaut, that's probably the first thing that comes to mind. right? Well, without space suit it will not be possible for us to survive in the space. For example, outer space is a vacuum. There's no gravity or air pressure. Without protection, a body would explode. What's more, we cook in the sun or freeze in the shade with temperatures ranging from a toasty 300 degrees above to a cool 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The space suit that NASA has developed is truly a marvel. This photo enlarges men there is a life image of actual size space suit worn by astronaut on the last space shuttle mission. This part is the torso. It is made from seven extremely durable layers. This thick insulation protects against temperature extremes and radiation. Next is what they call a bladder of oxygen. That's inflatable sack filled with oxygen to simulate atmospheric pressure. This blathered presses against the body the same force as the earth atmosphere at sea level. The innermost layers provide liquid cooling and ventilation. Despite all the layers, the suit is flexible allowing free movement so we can work. Another really sophisticated part of the space suit
托福TPO5综合写作阅读+听力原文+满分范文【雷哥托福】
托福TPO5综合写作阅读+听力原文+满分范文 【雷哥托福整理】 在备考托福写作的过程中，总是将托福的独立作文放在了第一位，但是实际上，综合作文也是占到了作文总分30分里面的50%的分值，不要等到分数出来了，才发现其实是综合作文的limited或者fair极大的影响了自己的分数。 考过的同学会发现托福综合作文分数不高，很大程度上是受我们听力实力的影响，我们很多托福考生的听力分数只有16分上下的时候，对于托福综合作文的听力妥妥的是束手无策，而且很多托福考生还感觉自己都听懂了，那也只能说明你听懂了大意，但是听力里面要的是每一个细节！请注意，是每一个细节！ 雷哥托福小托君给大家分享TPO1-33综合作文部分的阅读和听力文本全集与综合作文的满分作文，以及满分作文的解析。如果自己的托福综合作文分数如果可以很给力的话，就已经搞定了15分的分数，可极大地缓解托福独立作文的压力。文末教你如何使用这个材料。 TPO5 综合写作听力+阅读原文 Reading As early as the twelfth century A.D., the settlements of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico in the American Southwest were notable for their "great houses," massive stone buildings that contain hundreds of rooms and often stand three or four stories high. Archaeologists have been trying to determine how the buildings were used. While there is still no universally agreed upon explanation, there are three competing theories. One theory holds that the Chaco structures were purely residential, with each housing hundreds of people. Supporters of this theory have interpreted Chaco great houses as earlier versions of the architecture seen in more recent Southwest societies. In particular, the Chaco houses appear strikingly similar to the large, well-known "apartment buildings" at Taos, New Mexico, in which many people have been living for centuries.
托福TPO12综合写作阅读原文+听力原文+满分范文
为了帮助大家高效备考托福，为大家带来托福TPO12综合写作阅读原文+听力原文+满分范文，希望对大家备考有所帮助。 托福TPO12综合写作阅读原文文本： Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of the most famous of all English novelists, and today her novels are more popular than ever, with several recently adapted as Hollywood movies. But we do not have many records of what she looked like. For a long time, the only accepted image of Austen was an amateur sketch of an adult Austen made by her sister Cassandra. However recently a professionally painted, full-length portrait of a teenage girl owned by a member of the Austen family has come up for sale. Although the professional painting is not titled Jane Austen, there are good reasons to believe she is the subject. First, in 1882, several decades after Austen's death, Austen's family gave permission to use the portrait as an illustration in an edition of her letters. Austen's family clearly recognized it as a portrait of the author. So, for over a century now, the Austen family itself has endorsed the claim that the girl in the portrait is Jane Austen. Second, the face in the portrait clearly resembles the one in Cassandra's sketch, which we know depicts Austen. Though somewhat amateurish, the sketch communicates definite details about Austen's face. Even though the Cassandra sketch is of an adult Jane Austen, the features are still similar to those of the teenage girl in the painting. The eyebrows, nose, mouth, and overall shape of the face are very much like those in the full-length portrait. Third, although the painting is unsigned and undated, there is evidence that it was painted when Austen was a teenager. The style links it to Ozias Humphrey, a society portrait painter who was the kind of professional the wealthy Austen family would hire. Humphrey was active in the late 1780s and early 1790s, exactly the period when Jane Austen was the age of the girl in the painting. 托福TPO12综合写作听力原文文本： Professor：The evidence linking this portrait to Jane Austen is not at all convincing. Sure, the painting has long been somewhat loosely connected to Austen's extended family and their descendants, but this hardly proves it's a portrait of Jane Austen as a teenager. The reading's arguments that the portrait is of Austen are questionable at best.First, when the portrait was authorized for use in the 1882 publication of her letters, Jane Austen had been dead for almost 70 years. So the family members who asserted that the painting was Jane had never actually seen her themselves. They couldn't have known for certain if the portrait was of Austen or not.Second, the portrait could very well be that of a relative of Austen's, a fact that would explain the resemblance between its subject and that of Cassandra's sketch. The extended Austen family was very large and many of Jane Austen's female cousins were teenagers in the relevant period or had children who were teenagers. And some of these teenage girls could have resembled Jane Austen. In fact, many experts believe that the truesubject of the portrait was one of those relatives, Marianne Kempian,
老托精选93篇 听力原文.pdf
老托Part C精选93篇 1 Community service is an important component of education here at our university. We encourage all students to volunteer for at least one community activity before they graduate. A new community program called "One On One" helps elementary students who've fallen behind. You education majors might be especially interested in it because it offers the opportunity to do some teaching—that is, tutoring in math and English. You'd have to volunteer two hours a week for one semester. You can choose to help a child with math, English, or both. Half-hour lessons are fine, so you could do a half hour of each subject two days a week. Professor Dodge will act as a mentor to the tutors—he'll be available to help you with lesson plans or to offer suggestions for activities. He has office hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. You can sign up for the program with him and begin the tutoring next week. I'm sure you'll enjoy this community service and you'll gain valuable experience at the same time. It looks good on your resume, too, showing that you've had experience with children and that you care about your community. If you'd like to sign up, or if you have any questions, stop by Professor Dodge's office this week. 【生词摘录】 https://www.sodocs.net/doc/d518308671.html,ponent: n.［C］one of several parts that together make up a whole machine or system （机器或系统的）零件；成分；组成部分 2.tutor: n.［C］someone who teaches one pupil or a small group, and is directly paid by them 家庭教师，私人教师 v. to teach someone as a tutor 给… 当家庭教师；指导 3.mentor: n.［C］an experienced person who advises and helps a less experienced person 顾问，指导人，教练
老托福听力93篇(45-46)-So, why did what is now
老托福听力93篇(45-46)-So, why did what is now 45 So, why did what is now called "modern dance" begin in the United States? To begin to answer this question, I'll need to backtrack a little bit and talk about classical ballet. By the late 1800's, ballet had lost a lot of its popularity. Most of the ballet dancers who performed in the United States were brought over from Europe. They performed using the rigid techniques that had been passed down through the centuries. Audiences and dancers in the United States were eager for their own, "contemporary" dance form. And, so, around 1900, dancers created one. So, how was this "modern" dance so different from classical ballet? Well, most notably, it wasn't carefully choreographed. Instead, the dance depended on the improvisation and free, personal expression of the dancers. Music and scenery were of little importance to the "modern" dance, and lightness of movement wasn't important either. In fact, modern dancers made no attempt at all to conceal the effort involved in a dance step. But even if improvisation appealed to audiences, many dance critics were less than enthusiastic about the performances. They questioned the artistic integrity of dancers who were not professionally trained and the artistic value of works that had no formal structure. Loie Fuller, after performing Fire Dance, was described as doing little more than turning "round and round like an eggbeater." Yet, the free, personal expression of the pioneer dancers is the basis of the "controlled freedom" of modern dance today. 【生词摘录】 1. backtrack: v. (由原路)返回，后退 2. ballet: n. [C]芭蕾舞 3. rigid: adj. 严格的 4. contemporary: adj. 当代的 5. choreograph: v. 设计舞蹈动作，精心编排 6. improvisation: n. 即席创作 7. scenery: n. 舞台布景 8. lightness: n. 轻盈，灵活 9. conceal: v. 隐藏 10. eggbeater: n. [C]打蛋器 11. pioneer: adj. 先驱，创始人 12. controlled freedom: 克制的自由 46 Today I want to discuss fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. The term "fossil fuel" refers to the trapped remains of plants and animals in sedimentary rock. You see, living plants trap energy from the sun by the process of photosynthesis, and they store the energy in their chemical compounds. Most of that energy is released when the plant dies and decays. However, sometimes organic matter is buried before it decays completely. In this way some of the solar energy becomes trapped in rocks, hence the name fossil fuel. Although the amount of organic matter trapped in any one growing season is small, the accumulated remains from millions of years are considerable. Because the accumulation rate is so slow, millions of times slower than the rate at which we now dig up this organic matter and
老托福93篇听力原文
1 Community service is an important component of education here at our university. We encourage all students to volunteer for at least one community activity before they graduate. A new community program called "One On One" helps elementary students who've fallen behind. Y ou education majors might be especially interested in it because it offers the opportunity to do some teaching—that is, tutoring in math and English. Y ou'd have to volunteer two hours a week for one semester. Y ou can choose to help a child with math, English, or both. Half-hour lessons are fine, so you could do a half hour of each subject two days a week. Professor Dodge will act as a mentor to the tutors---he'll be available to help you with lesson plans or to offer suggestions for activities. He has office hours every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. Y ou can sign up for the program with him and begin the tutoring next week. I'm sure you'll enjoy this community service and you'll gain valuable experience at the same time. It looks good on your resume, too, showing that you've had experience with children and that you care about your community. If you'd like to sign up, or if you have any questions, stop by Professor Dodge's office this week. 2 I hope you've all finished reading the assigned chapter on insurance so
老托福听力93篇(87-88)-These days we take
老托福听力93篇(87-88)-These days we take 87 These days we take for granted the wide variety of music available on the radio. But, this wasn't always the case. In the early days of radio, stations were capable of broadcasting only a narrow range of sounds, which was all right for the human voice but music didn't sound very good. There was also a great deal of crackling and other static noises that further interfered with the quality of the sound. A man named Edwin Armstrong, who was a music lover, set out to change this. He invented FM radio, a technology that allowed stations to send a broad range of frequencies that greatly improved the quality of the music. Now, you'd think that this would have made him a millionaire; it didn't. Radio stations at that time had invested enormous amounts of money in the old technology. So the last thing they wanted was to invest millions more in the new technology. Nor did they want to have to compete with other radio stations that had a superior sound and could put them out of business. So they pressured the Federal Communications Commission, the department of the United States government that regulates radio stations, to put restrictive regulations on FM radio. The result was that its use was limited to a very small area around New England. Of course as we all know, Edwin Armstrong's FM technology eventually prevailed and was adopted by thousands of stations around the world. But this took years of court battles and he never saw how it came to affect the lives of almost everyone. 【生词摘录】 1. crackling: n. [C]爆裂声 2. static: adj. 静电的 3. FM: 调频(frequency modulation) 4. frequency: n. [C]频率 5. millionaire: n. [C]百万富翁，大富豪 6. restrictive: adj. 限制性的 7. regulation: n. 规则，规章 8. prevail: v. 流行，盛行，获胜，成功 9. adopt: v. 采用 88 I'm going to talk about a train that exemplifies the rise and fall of passenger trains in the United States: the Twentieth Century Limited. Let me go back just a bit. In 1893, a special train was established to take people from New York to an exposition in Chicago. It was so successful that regular service was then set up between these cities. The inaugural trip of the Twentieth Century Limited was made in 1902. The train was different from what anyone had ever seen before. It was pulled by a steam engine and had five cars: two sleepers, a dining car, an observation car, and a baggage car, which, believe it or not, contained a library. The 42 passengers the train could carry were waited on by a large staff. There were even secretaries and a barber on board. It wasn't long before people had to wait two years to get a reservation. As time passed, technical improvements shortened the trip by a few hours. Perhaps the biggest technological change occurred in 1945, the switch from steam to diesel engines. By the 1960's, people were traveling by car and airplane. Unfortunately, the great old train didn't survive until the end of the century it was named for. 【生词摘录】
老托福听力93篇(33-34)-Today I want to talk about
老托福听力93篇(33-34)-Today I want to talk about 33 Today I want to talk about the Earth's last major climatic shift, at the end of the last ice age. But first, let's back up a moment and review what we know about climatic change in general. First, we defined "climate" as consistent patterns of weather over significant periods of time. In general, changes in climate occur when the energy balance of the Earth is disturbed. Solar energy enters the Earth's atmosphere as light and is radiated by the Earth's surface as heat. Land, water, and ice each affect this energy exchange differently. The system is so complex that, to date, our best computer models are only crude approximations and are not sophisticated enough to test hypotheses about the causes of climatic change. Of course, that doesn't keep us from speculating. For instance, volcanic activity is one mechanism that might affect climatic change. When large volcanoes erupt, they disperse tons of particles into the upper atmosphere, where the particles then reflect light. Since less light is entering the system of energy exchange, the result would be a cooling of the Earth's surface. Of course, this is just one possible mechanism of global climate change. In all probability, a complete explanation would involve several different mechanisms operating at the same time. 【生词摘录】 1. climatic: adj. connected with the weather in a particular area 气候的 2. ice age: one of the long periods of time, thousands of years ago, when ice covered many northern countries 冰川期，冰河时代 3. consistent: adj. always having the same beliefs, behavior, attitudes, quality etc(信仰、行为、态度、品质等)一贯的，一致的;始终如一的 4. disturb: v. to interrupt someone so that they cannot continue what they are doing by asking a question, making a noise etc 干扰，打扰;使中断 5. radiate: v. if something radiates light or heat, or if light or heat radiates from something, it is sent out in all directions 辐射(光或热);(向四面八方)发射 6. crude: adj. not developed to a high standard or made with great skill 粗制的 7. approximation: n. [C]a number, amount etc that is not exact, but is almost correct 概算，近似值 8. hypothesis: n. [C]plural hypotheses, an idea that is suggested as a possible way of explaining a situation, proving and idea etc, which has not yet been shown to be true 假设，假说 9. speculate: v. to think or talk about the possible causes or effects of something without knowing all the facts or details 猜测，推测 10. disperse: v. if something disperses or is dispersed, it spreads over a wide area(使)消散;(使)分散 11. cooling: n.[U]the process of becoming cooler; a falling temperature 冷却 34 I know you're anxious to get your permits and get started. But there're just a few things I'd like to mention that might help you avoid trouble during your stay. First of all, make sure you carry adequate water. You'll need it if you're hiking, especially in this heat. A good rule of thumb is to bring one gallon per person per day this time of year. Don't try to rely on the park's natural springs to supply all your water needs. And please, do not use soap in the springs. It's your responsibility to protect the park's natural features. For those of you staying beyond the weekend, make sure that you set up camp well away from dry creekbeds. We may get some heavy rainfall, and those creekbeds could quickly
托福听力TPO1原文 Lecture 4
下面就让小编来为大家介绍一下托福听力TPO1原文中Lecture 4的文本内容吧，大 家要好好把握，这些都是非常有价值的材料，希望能够给准备托福听力的同学带来帮助。 TPO 1 Lecture 4BiologyNarratorListen to part of a lecture in a biology class. ProfessorFor today’s discussion, we’ll review the case study on how some animals have behaviorally adapted to their environments. Now you had to read about two animal species, the Eastern marmot and the Olympic marmot. Marmots are rodents. They are large ground squirrels, about the size of an average house cat. And they live in a variety of habitats. And even though they spend the significant portion of the year hibernating, according to this case study, marmots are still considered excellent subjects for animal behavioral studies. Why is that? StudentWell, when they are not hibernating, you can find them in open areas. And they are pretty active during the day, which makes them easy to observe, right? ProfessorUh-huh, so first let’s discuss the Eastern marmots. They reside throughout the eastern region of North America where there is a temperate climate, where the growing season lasts for at least five months of the year, which is when they do all their mating, playing and eating. StudentOh, I see. At first I wasn’t sure what growing season meant, just from the reading. But now I get it. It's the amount of time it takes for them to grow, right? So it would be five months? ProfessorUmm? Oh, uh… I’m sorry but no. It has nothing to do with that. It's not about the time it takes for Eastern marmots to grow. It’s when the food is available. That is when it’s not covered in snow and there is no frost covering the grass and, umm, vegetative parts of a plant’s herbs and the flowers the marmots like to eat. So growing season refers to the availability of the food they eat, OK? So now how would you describe the Eastern marmots’ social habits? StudentWell, they are really territorial, and loners, and just so aggressive even with other Eastern marmots. And their mating ritual is just so impersonal. ProfessorUh-huh? Now when they emerge in the spring from hibernation, the mating process begins. For them, well, they come together to mate and then they
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