托福听力TPO15原文文本资料【含音频】

2022-05-25 05:30:06

  

  Conversation 1

  Narrator:

  Listen to a conversation between a student and the faculty advisor of the

  campus newspaper .

  Student

  Hi! I talked to someone on the phone a couple of weeks ago, Anna , I

  think it was?

  Advisor

  I'm Anna, the faculty advisor

  Student

  Oh, great! I'm Peter Murphy. You probably don't r e member me, but …

  Advisor

  No! No! I remember you . You're interested in working for the paper.

  Student

  Yeah, as a reporter .

  Advisor

  That's right. You're taking a jo urnalism class and you ’ ve done some

  reporting before in high school, right?

  Student

  Wow, you have a good memory.

  Advisor

  Well we haven ’ t had many students applying lately so … so anyway, you

  still want to do some reporting for us?

  Student

  Yeah, if you have room for me on the staff .

  Advisor

  Well we always need more reporters, but you know, we don't pay

  anything, right?

  Student

  Yeah, I know, but I huh.. . I'd like the experience. It would look good on

  my resume .

  Advisor

  Absolutely! Let's see . I think I told you that we ask prospective reporters

  to turn in some outlines for possible articles .

  Student

  Yeah, I sent them in about a week ago, but I haven't heard anything back

  yet, so, so I thought I'd stop by and see, but I guess you haven't looked at

  them yet .

  Advisor

  Oh, Max, the news editor. He looks a t all the submissions

  Student

  Oh , so he hasn't made any decision about me yet?

  Advisor

  Well I just got here a few minutes ago... haven't been in for a couple of

  days. Just give me a second to check my e-mail. Uh … here is a message

  from Max. Let ’ s see. Well it seems you ’ ve really impressed him. He says it

  would be wonderful if you could join our staff.

  Student

  Oh, great! When can I start?

  Advisor

  WeII, you turned in an outline on something to do with the physics

  department?

  Student

  Yeah, they're trying to come up with ways to get more students to take

  their introductory courses.

  Advisor

  Right, well , apparently, nobody else is covering that story , so he wants

  you to follow up on it.

  Student

  OK. Uh … wha t the other outline I sent in, about the proposed increase in

  tuition fees?

  Advisor

  Oh, it lo oks like we've got that covered

  Student

  So I am starting with an article about the physics department. I guess I'd

  better get to work. Do you have any advice on how I should cover the

  story?

  Advisor

  Well, Max will want to talk to you but I am sure he will tell you to find

  out things like why the physics department's worried about enrollment.

  Has the number of students been getting smaller in recent years? By

  how much? What kinds of plans are they considering to address this

  problem?

  Student

  Right, some of those issues are already in what I proposed .

  Advisor

  And you'll want to do some interviews, you know, what do the professors

  think of the plans , what do the students think you get the idea but …

  Student

  But w ai t till I talk to Max before proceeding .

  Advisor

  Right, he'll cover everything you need to know to be a report e r for us .

  Can you come back this afternoon? He will be here until 5 o'clock .

  TPO 15 Lecture 1 Psychology

  Narrator:

  Listen to part of a lecture in a psychology class

  Professor

  For decades, psychologists have been looking at our ability to perform

  tasks while other things are going on, how we are able to keep from

  being distracted and what the conditi ons for good concentration are. As

  long ago as 1982, researchers came up with something call ed the CFQ -

  the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. This questionnaire asks people to

  rate themselves according to how often they get distracted in different

  situations, like h um … .. forgetti ng to save a computer file because they

  had something else on their mind or missing a speed limit sign on the

  road. John?

  John

  I've lost my share of computer files, but not because I ’ m easily distracted.

  I just forget to save them.

  Professor

  And that's part of the problem with th e CFQ. It doesn ’ t take other factors

  into account enough, like forgetfulness. Plus you really can ’ t say you are

  getting objective scientific results from a subjective questionnaire where

  people report on themselves. S o it ’ s no surprise that someone

  attempted to design an objective way to measure distraction. I t ’ s a

  simple computer game designed by a psychologist named, Nilli Lavie. In

  Lavie ’ s game, people watch as the letters N and X appear and disappear

  in a certain area on the computer screen. Every time they see an N, they

  press one key, and every time they see an X they press another, except

  other letters also start appearing in the surrounding area of the screen

  with increasing frequency which creates a distraction and makes the task

  more difficult. Lavie observed that people ’ s reaction time slowed as

  these distractions increased.

  Student 2

  Well that ’ s not too surprising, isn ’ t it?

  Professor

  No, it's not. It's the next part of the experiment that was surprising.

  When the difficulty really increased, when the screen filled up with

  letters, people got better al spotting the Xs and Ns . What do you think

  that happened?

  John

  Well, maybe when we are really concentrating, we just don't perceive

  irrelevant information . Maybe we just don't take it in, you know?

  Professor

  Yes, and that's one of the hypotheses that was proposed, that the brain

  simply doesn't admit the unimportant information. The second

  h ypothesis is that, yes, we do perceive everything, but the brain

  categorizes the information, and whatever is not relevant to what we are

  concentrating on gets treated as low priority. So Lavie did another

  experiment, designed to look at the ability to concentrate better in the

  face of increased difficulty. This time she used brain scanning equipment

  to monitor activity in a certain part of the brain, the area called V5,

  which is part of the visual cortex, the part of our brains that processes

  visual stimuli .

  V5 is the area of the visual cortex that's responsible for the sensation of

  movement. Once again, Lavie gave people a computer-based task to do.

  They have to distinguish between words in upper and lower-case letters

  or even harder, they had to count the number of syllables in different

  words. This time the distraction was a moving star f i el d in the

  background, you know, where H looks like you are moving through space,

  passing stars. Normally area of V5 would be stimulated as those moving

  stars are perceived and sure enough, Lavie found that during the task

  area of V5 was active, so people were aware of the moving star field.

  That means people were not blocking out the distraction.

  Student

  So doesn't that mean that the first hypothesis y ou mentioned w as wr o ng,

  the one that says we don't even perceive irrelevant information when we

  are concentrating?

  Professor

  Yes that's right, up to a point, bu t that ’ s not all. Lavie also discovered that

  as she made the task more difficult , V5 became less a ctive, so that

  means that now people weren ’ t really noticing the star field at all. That

  was quite a surprise and it approved that the second hypothesis – that

  we do perceive eve rything all the time but the brain categorizes

  distractions differently, well, that wasn't true eith er. Lavie thinks the

  solution lies in the brain ’ s ability to accept or ignore visual information.

  She thinks its capacity is limited. I t ’ s like a highway. W hen there are too

  many cars, traffic is sto pp e d. No one can get on. S o when the brain is

  loaded to capacity, no new distractions can be perceived . Now that may

  be the correct conclusion for visual distractions, but more research is

  needed to tell us how the brain deals with, say, the distractions of solving

  a math problem when we are hungry or when someone is singing in the

  next room.

  TPO 15 Lecture 2 Geology

  Narrator:

  Listen to part of a lecture in a geology class .

  Professor

  As geologists , we examine layers of sediment on the Earth' s surface to

  approximate the dates of past geologic time periods. Ah sediment as you

  know i s material like sand , gravel, fossil fragments that is transported by

  natural processes like win d , water flow or the movement of glaciers .

  So sediment is transported and then deposited and it forms layers on the

  Earth ’ s surface over time. We examine these layers to learn about

  different ge ologic time periods including when they began and ended.

  For example, from about 1.8 million years ago to around 11 thousand

  years ago was the Pleistocene epic. The Pleistocene epic was an ice age.

  During this epic, sediment was made by the kind of erosion and

  we athering that happens when the climate is colder, and part of those

  sediments are fossils of plants and animals that lived at that time.

  The Holocene epic followed the Pleistoce ne epic when the Earth ’ s

  climate warmed up around 11 thousand years ago. The Holocene e pic is

  characterized by different sediments, ones that form when the climate is

  warme r. Because the climate changed, the types of plants and animals

  changed also. Holocene sediments contain remnants of more recent

  plants and animals, so it's pretty easy to diffe rentiate geologically

  between these two epics.

  Now there is growing evidence that the presence of humans has altered

  the earth so much that a new epic of geologic history has began – the

  Anthropocene epic, a new human-influe nced epic. T his idea that we ’ ve

  entered a new Anthro-pocene epic was first proposed in 2002. T he idea

  is that around the year 1800 CE the human population became large

  enough, around a billion people, that its activities started altering the

  environment. T his was also the time of the industrial revolution, which

  brought a tremendous increase in the use of fossil fuels such coal. The

  exploitation of fossil fuels has brought planet wide developments:

  industrialization, construction, uh, mass transport. And these

  developments have caused major changes like additional erosion of the

  Earth ’ s surface and deforestation. Also, things like the damming of rivers ,

  has caused increased sediment production, not to mention the addition

  of more carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere .

  Naturally all these changes show up in recent sediments. And these

  sediments are quite different from pre year 1800 sediment layers.

  Interestingly there's some speculation that h umans started having a

  major impact on Earth much earlier, about 8000 years ago. That's when

  agriculture was becoming widespread. Early farmers started clearing

  forests and livestock produced a lot of extra methane. But I want to

  stress this is just a hypothesis. The idea that early humans could have

  had such a major effect, well I'm just not sure we can compare it with

  the industrial age. Geologists in the far future will be able t o examine the

  sediment being laid down today, whereas right now we can say that yes,

  human impact on the Earth is clear: It'll be future researchers who have

  a better perspective and will be able to really draw a line between the

  Holocene and the Anthropocene epics

  TPO 15 Conversation 2

  Narrator

  Listen to part of a conversation between a student and her biology .

  Professor

  Hi Samantha, how did your track meet go?

  Samantha

  Great! I placed first in one race and third in another.

  Professor

  Congratulations ! You must practice a lot.

  Samantha

  Three times a week pre-season, but now that we ’ re competing every

  weekend, we practice 6 days a week from 3:30 till 5:00.

  Professor

  Athletics place a heavy demand on your time, don ’ t they?

  Samantha

  Yeah, but I really love competing, so …

  Professor

  You know I played soccer in college and my biggest challenge, and I

  didn ’ t always succeed, was getting my studying in during soccer season.

  Are you having a similar …

  Samantha

  No, I … I really do make time to study. A nd I actually study more for this

  class than I do for all my other classes. B ut I didn ’ t see the grade I

  expected on my mid-term exam, which is why I came by.

  Professor

  Well, you "didn't do badly on the exam, but I agree it did not reflect your

  potential. I say this because your work on the lab project was exemplary.

  I was so impressed with the way you handle the microscope and the

  samples of onion cells, and with how carefully you observed and

  diagramed and interpreted each stage of cell division. And I don't think

  you could have done that if you hadn't read and understood the chapter.

  I mean it seemed like you really had a good understanding of it.

  Samantha

  I thought so too, but I missed some questions about cell division on the

  exam

  Professor

  So what happened?

  Samantha

  I just sort of blanked out, I guess. I had a hard time remembering details.

  It was so frustrating.

  Professor

  Alright, let's back up. You say you studied, where, at home?

  Samantha

  At my kitchen table actually .

  Professor

  And that's supposed to be a quiet environment?

  Samantha

  Not exactly. My brother and parents try to keep it down when I am

  studying, but the phone pretty much rings off the hook, so …

  Professor

  So you might try a place with fewer distractions, like the library …

  Samantha

  But the library closes at mid-night, and I like to study all night before a

  test, you know, so everything is fresh in my mind. I studied six straight

  hours the night before the mid-term exam . T hat ’ s why I expected to do

  so much better.

  Professor

  Oh ok. Y ou know that studying six consecutive hours is not equivalent to

  studying one hour a day for six days.

  Samantha

  It isn ’ t?

  Professor

  No. There is research that shows that after about an hour of intense

  focus, your brain needs a break. It needs to, you know, shift gears a little.

  Your brain's ability to absorb information starts to decline after about the

  first hour. So if you are dealing with a lot of new concepts and vocabulary,

  anyway, if you just reviewed your notes, even 20 minutes a day, it'd be

  much better than waiting until the night before an exam to try and

  absorb all those details .

  Samantha

  Oh, I didn't realize .

  Professor

  Think of your brain as: a muscle. If you didn't practice regularly with your

  track team, and then tried to squeeze in three weeks worth of running

  practice just the day before a track meet, how well do you think you'd

  perform in your races?

  TPO 15 Lecture 3 Art History

  Narrator:

  Listen to part of a lecture in an art history class .

  Professor:

  Now in Europe in the Middle Ages before the invention of printing and

  the p r inting pres s, all books, all manual scripts were hand-made. And the

  material typically used for the pages was parchment, which is animal skin

  that stretched and dried under tension, so it bec o me s really fat and can

  be written on . During the 1400s, when printing was being developed,

  paper became the predominant material for books in Europe, but prior

  to t hat, it was parchment . Parchment is durable, much more so than

  paper, and it could be reus ed which came in handy since it was a costly

  material and in short supply. So it wasn ’ t uncommon for the scribes or

  monks who produce the manual scripts . Ah, remember before printing

  books were made mainly in monasteries . Well, the scribes often recycled

  the parchment that ’ d been used for earlier manual scripts. They simply

  erased the ink off the parchment and wrote something new in its place

  A manual script page that was written on, erased and then used again is

  called a palimpsest . Palimpsests were created, well, w e kn ow about two

  methods that were used for removing ink from parchment. In the late

  Middle Ages, it was customary to scrape away the surface of the

  parchment with an abrasive, which completely wiped out any writing

  that was there. But earlier in the Middle Ages, the original ink was

  usually removed by washing the used parchment with milk. That

  removed the ink. But with the passing of time, the original writing might

  reappear. In fact , it might rea pp ear to the extent that scholars could

  make out an even deci p her , the original text. Perhaps, the most famous

  example is the Archimedes' palimpsest.

  Archimedes li v e d in G re ece around 200 BCE, and as you probably know,

  he's considered one of the greatest Mathematicians who ever lived, even

  though , many of his writings had been lost , includi ng what many now

  think to be his most important work called The Method . But in 1998, a

  book of prayers from the Middle Ages sold in an art auction for a lot of

  money, more money than anyone would pay for a damaged book from

  the 12th century. Beautiful or not, why? It had been discovered that the

  book was a palimpsest, and beneath the surface writing on the manual

  script laid, guess what? Mathematical theorems and diagrams from

  Archimedes

  Archimedes' writings were originally done on papyrus scrolls. Then in the

  10 th century, a scribe made a copy on parchment of some of his texts and

  diagrams including, as it turns out, The Method . This was extremely

  fortunate, since later on, the original papyrus scrolls disappeared. About

  200 years later in the 12 th century, this parchment manual script became

  a palimpsest when a scribe used the parchment to make a prayer book.

  So the pages, the pieces of parchment themselves, had been preserved.

  But the Archimedes' text was erased and written over, and no one knew

  it existed. It wasn't until 1906 that a scholar came across the prayer book

  in a library and realized it was a palimpsest, and that the underlying layer

  of texts could only have come from Archimedes. That was when his work

  The Method was discovered for the first time .

  Um... the palimpsest then went through some more tough times, but

  eventually it ended up in an art auction where was bought and then

  donated to an art museum in Baltimore, for conservation and study. To

  avoid further damage to the manual script, the research team at the art

  museum has had to be extremely selective in their techniques they used

  to see the original writing. They've used ultraviolet light and some other

  techniques, and if you're interested in that sort of thing, you can learn

  more about it in an art conservation class. But act ually, it was a physicist

  who came up with a method that was a breakthrough. He realized that

  the iron in the ancient ink would display if exposed to a certain X-ray

  imaging method, and except for small portions of the text that couldn't

  be deciphered, this technique's been very helpful in seeing Archimedes'

  texts and drawings through the medieval over w riting .

  TPO 15 Lecture 4 Biology

  Narrator:

  Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class.

  Professor:

  OK. We've been talking till now about the two basic needs of a biological

  community – an energy source to produce organic materials, you know

  ah, food for the organism , and the waste recycling or breakdown of

  materials back into inorganic molecules, and abo ut how all this requires

  photosynthesis when green plants or microbes convert sunlight into

  energy and also requires microorganisms, bacteria, to secrete chemicals

  that break down or r ecycle the organic material to complete the cycle

  So, now we are done with this chapter of the textbook, we can just

  review for the weekly quiz and move on to the next chapter, right? Well,

  not so fas t. First, I ‘d like to talk about some discoveries that have

  challenged one of these fundamental assumptions about what you need

  in order to have a biological community.

  And, well, there actually were quite a few surpris es. I t all began in 1977

  with the exploration of hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor.

  Hydrothermal vents are cracks in the Earth ’ s surface that occur, well, the

  ones we are taiking about here are found deep at the bottom of the

  ocean. And these vents on the ocean floo r, they release this incredibly

  hot water, 3-4 times the temperature that you boil water at be cause this

  water has been heated deep within the Earth. Well about 30 years ago,

  researche rs sent a deep-sea vessel to explore the ocean ’ s depth, about 3

  kilometers down, way deep to ocean floor, No one had ever explored

  that far down before. Nobody exp ected there to be any life down there

  because of the conditions. First of all, sunlight doesn't rea ch that far

  down so it ’ s totally dark. There couldn ’ t be any plant or animal life since

  there's no sunlight, no source of energy to make food. If there was any

  life at all, it ’ d just be some bacter ia breaking down any dead materials

  that might have fallen to the bottom of the ocean . And?

  Student 1

  And what about the water pressure? D idn ’ t we talk before about how

  the deeper down into the ocean you go, the greater the pressure?

  Professor

  Excellent point! And not only the extreme pressure, but also the extreme

  temperature of the water around these vents. If the lack of sunlight

  didn't rule out the existence of a biological community down there then

  these factors certainly would, or so they thought.

  Student 2

  So you are telling us they did find organisms that could live under those

  conditions?

  Professor:

  They did indeed, something like 300 different species

  Student 1 But... but how could that be? I mean without sunlight, no energy, no no …

  Protessor:

  What they discovered was that microorganisms, bacteria, had taken over

  both functions of the biological community - the recycling of waste

  materials and the production of energy. They were the energy source.

  You see, it turns out that certain microorganisms are chemosynthetic -

  they don't need sunlight because they take their energy from chemical

  reactions

  So, as I said, unlike green plants which are photosynthetic and their

  energy from sunlight, these bacteria that they found at the ocean floor,

  these are chemosynthetic, which means that they get their energy from

  chemical reactions. How does this work?

  As we said, these hydrothermal vents are releasing into the ocean depth

  this intensely hot water and here is the thing, this hot water co ntains a

  chemical called hydrogen sulfide, and also a gas , carbon dioxide. Now

  these bacteria actually combine the hydrogen sulfide with the carbon

  dioxide and this chemical reaction is what produces organic material

  which is the food for larger organisms. The researchers had n ever seen

  anything like it before.

  Student 2 : : : :

  Wow! So just add a chemical to a gas, and bingo, you ’ ve got a food

  supply?

  Professor

  Not just t h at! W hat was even more surprising were all the large

  organisms that lived down there. The most distinctive of these was

  something called the tube worm. H ere, let me show you a picture .

  The tube of the tube worm is really, really long. They can be up to one

  and half meters long , and these tubes are attached to the ocean floor,

  pretty weird looking, huh?

  And another thing, the tube worm has no. mouth, or digestive organs. So

  you are asking how does it eat? Well, they have these special organs that

  collect the hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide and then transfer it to

  another organ, where billions of bacteria live. These bacteria that live

  inside the tube worms, the tube worms provide them with hydrogen

  sulfide and carbon dioxide. And the bacteria, well the bacteria kind of

  feed the tube worms through chemosynthesis, remember, that chemical

  reaction I described earlier.

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