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Section1
Conversation1
Narrator
Listen to a conversation between a student and an employee at the student activity center.
Student
This is the administrative office, right?
Employee
Uh-huh. How can I help you?
Student
Well, I am stopping by to reserve a place for my school club that meet and work, pretty much on a regular basis. Ideally, our preference would be to have our own office.
Employee
Hmm…well, we are out of private offices. But we do have some semi-private options still available.
Student
What do you mean?
Employee
Well, it’s a setup where you’ll have a larger workspace shared by two other clubs. In other words, each club would have its own work area within that one room.
Student
Oh. Are there any divider, walls or anything?
Employee
Oh, yes. There will be a couple of dividers, so there’s some privacy.
Student
Um. We’ll work with that then. I wouldn’t want to be without an office.
Employee
OK. Here are the two forms you have to fill out. Why don’t you do it now while I set that up through out computer system.
Student
OK.
Employee
So what’s your club’s name? And the last name of the club president.
Student
Oh, it’s the photography club. And it’s Williams. That’s me. John Williams.
Employee
Hmm…that’s not pulling up anything on my screen. Um…let me try something else. Uh, how about your faculty advisor’s name?
Student
Sarah Baker. She is in the Arts Department.
Employee
Hmm…No. Strange. You know your club is just not showing up in my online records. Is this an established club?
Student
No. Actually it’s a brand-new one.
Employee
Hmm…have you completed the registration process?
Student
Yeah, last week. That was my very first step.
Employee
Right. Well, for my purposes, a club definitely has to be registered before I can proceed further. At the moment, however, it appears that there’s no record of your club’s registration.
Student
Really? I thought everything was finalized last week.
Employee
Well, it is surprising. Usually there’s a 24-hour turnaround in our computer database. So then do you have the registration approval letter from the review committee? That would give me the verification I need.
Student
Yeah. I do. I mean, well, I don’t have it with me. But … I… I, uh, can get it from my dorm room, bring it back with me and submit it with those forms you need from me.
Employee
Great! That’ll work. And just so you are aware, there’re lots of benefits to being registered.
Student
Oh, yeah. I think the university will give us permission to set up a website, right? I want to get students sharing their ideas on the website, you know, establish a photography blog.
Employee
Yes. You’ll be able to do that. And…um…actually there’s more. You’ll be allowed the use of audiovisual equipment at no cost. You’ll receive a club mailbox and a club email address. You’ll be allowed to post your flyers and posters around the campus for publicity. And you could be eligible for funding for club events.
Student
Well, we are definitely interested in hiring a professional speaker at one of our campus events at some point in the semester. And speakers almost always charge a fee. So I’ll definitely follow up on that.
Lecture1
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class.
Professor
We’ve been talking about animal cognition—the study of animal intelligence. Now, much of the research in this area is motivated by the search for animal analogues, or parallels to human cognitive processes. And one of the processes we’ve been investigating is metacognition.
What is metacognition? Well, it’s being aware of what one knows or feels, uh, um… having an awareness of one’s state of mind. And making decisions about behavior based on what one knows. Researchers have long been interested in whether animals possess this capability, but…but couldn’t test it because animals aren’t able to report their feelings.
But recently one group of researchers found a way to solve this problem. They did studies with…with monkeys and dolphins that provide evidence that these animals have the ability to feel uncertainty, to feel unsure about something and…and…well, to know that they are uncertain.
So how could these researchers figure out if an animal feels uncertainty. Well, it began with a study one of them did on a dolphin, who had been trained to recognize a particular high-pitched tone. The dolphin was taught to press one of two paddles depending on whether it heard the high tone or one that was lower. Food was a reward for a correct response. But if the wrong paddle was pressed, the dolphin had to wait several seconds before it could try again. The task varied in difficulty according to the pitch of the second tone. The closer it came in pitch to the first one, the hard it became for the dolphin to correctly identify it as low. And the researcher noted that the dolphin is quite eager to press the paddle when it was sure of the answer, but exhibited hesitation during difficult trials.
Next the researcher introduced a third option, a third paddle that would initiate a new trial, giving the dolphin the choice of passing on difficult trials. Once the dolphin figured out the result of pressing this new paddle, it did choose it frequently when the trial was difficult. The researcher took that as an indication that the animal wanted to pass because it didn’t know the answer and knew it didn’t know.
But there was a problem. Other researchers protested that the… the opt-out response was simply a learned or conditioned response. You remember intro to psychology, right? In other words, by pressing the pass paddle, the dolphin avoided having to wait and hasten the possibility of a full reward by moving directly to the next trial. So the experiment didn’t necessarily indicate that the dolphin had knowledge of its own uncertainty, just that it wanted to avoid negative consequences.
So more recently, our researcher and his colleagues devised a new study, this time using monkeys. In this experiment, the monkeys had to identify certain patterns displayed on a computer screen. These patterns were analogous to the tones used in the dolphin study. One type of pattern was of a specific density and was to be classified as dense, while the second type of pattern could vary in density, but was always less dense than the first one. And the monkeys’ task was to identify this second type as sparse. So the denser the second type of pattern was, the more difficult the task became.
And as in a previous study, the monkeys were given a third choice that would allow them to pass on to a new trial. But unlike in the dolphin experiment, the monkeys had to complete four trials before they got any feedback. They didn’t know if they responded correctly or incorrectly after each trial because there was no reward or punishment. At the end of four trials, feedback was given. The monkeys received a full reward for each correct response. And a time-out during which a buzzer was sounded for each incorrect response. But the monkeys had no way to tell which reward or punishment was associated with which response. And they didn’t get either reward or punishment for choosing the pass option, the…um…the uncertainty response. But nevertheless they still chose this option in the appropriate circumstances when the trial was particularly difficult. And this is evidence that it wasn’t a conditioned response, because that response didn’t guarantee a faster reward.
So what does all this tell us about animal consciousness or animals’ awareness of themselves and their state of mind? Can we really know what’s going on in the minds of animals? No. Of course not. But exploring the metacognitive capacity of animals could become an important criterion in highlighting the similarities and differences between human and animal minds.
Lecture2-Paleontology
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in a paleontology class.
Professor
As we’ve discussed, birds are apparently descendants of dinosaurs and shared many commonalities with some dinosaur species, like…um…feathers and maybe even flight and of course egg laid. OK.
So, many paleontologists, myself included, have wondered about other similarities between dinosaurs and birds. Since adult dinosaur fossils have sometimes been discovered near or on top of nests, we’ve been looking at the dinosaur parenting behavior.
Student
Parenting behavior, well, that sounds so gentle and caring. But dinosaurs were ferocious reptiles and reptiles don’t take care of their young, do they?
Professor
Well, some reptiles incubate their eggs, crocodiles do. And as for popular attitudes towards dinosaurs…well, take the Oviraptor for instance.
In the 1920s, a paleontologist discovered the fossil remains of a small dinosaur near a nest containing eggs. He assumed the dinosaur was stealing the eggs, so he named it Oviraptor that means egg thief in Latin, which fueled the generally negative public image of such dinosaurs.
But by the 1990s, other experts had convincingly made the case that instead of robbing the nest; the Oviraptor was probably taking care of the eggs. You see, dinosaurs’ closest living relatives – birds and crocodiles – display nesting behavior. And dinosaur fossils have been found in postures that we now believe to indicate brooding behavior, that is, sitting on the eggs until they hatch.
So we are curious about the type of care dinosaurs gave to their young. And we’d like to figure out which dinosaur parent, the male or the female gave the care.
Student
Shouldn’t the behavior of crocodiles and birds give us some clues then?
Professor
Well, with crocodiles, it is the female who guards the nest, and with birds, it depends on the species, it can be the male or the female that takes care the eggs, or both. In over 90 percent of all bird species, both parents take care of the eggs and the young birds.
Student
But sometimes it’s just the male?
Professor
Well, exclusive care by the male parent is much less common, but it does occur. Now, for animals other than birds, the care of young by both parents is pretty unusual in the animal kingdom. Males contribute to parental care in fewer than five percent of all mammalian species. It’s even less frequent among reptiles. And exclusive care by the male is very rare. So researchers have wondered about the evolution of male parenting behavior in birds for quite some time. And now there’s research showing that for some of the birds’ dinosaur relatives, it’s likely that the male parent was also in charge of taking care of the eggs.
Student
How did they figure that out?
Professor
Well, first they looked at clutch volume, that’s the number of eggs in the nest of crocodiles, birds and three types of dinosaurs, including Oviraptors that are thought to be closely related to the dinosaur ancestors of birds.
So when researchers examined fossilized remains of nests, they found that the dinosaurs had larger clutch volumes, more eggs in the nests that is, than most of the crocodiles and birds that were studied. But, and this is important, their clutch volumes matched those of birds that have only male parental care. You see, bird species in which only the males take care of the nest tend to have the largest clutches of eggs.
Student
So what’s the connection between bird and dinosaur behavior?
Professor
Well, researchers now believe, because of this study, that the male parenting behavior of these birds might have its origins in the behavior of dinosaurs.
Student
Based only on evidence of clutch volume size, the number of eggs?
Professor
No, there’s more. They also examined the fossilized bones of those three types of dinosaurs that were found on or near nests to determine their sex. You see, adult female birds during egg production produce a layer of spongy bone tissue inside certain long bones. And so did female dinosaurs of the kinds that were investigated. This spongy tissue serves as a source of calcium for eggshell formation. But when the dinosaur fossils were examined, there were no spongy bone deposits.
Student
Meaning that those dinosaurs on the nests were probably adult males who wouldn’t have needed calcium for making eggshells.
Professor
Exactly. And then there’s this: birds like the kiwi, the ostrich and the emu; they share certain physical characteristics with these dinosaurs. And interestingly, they also show a consistent pattern of nest care by the male.
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