听力原文Model Test OneSection AConversation OneM: Hey. Have you ever heard of the Oscars, or Academy Awards?W: Well, I should say I’ve done more than hear of them. I know them quite well. The Academy Awards, or Oscars, are given every year in the United States by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for excellence in the creation and production of motion pictures. First presented in 1929, the Oscars are among the film industry’s most desired prizes.M: That seems very interesting. I wonder whether you know the principal categories for Academy Awards winners.W: They include Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Special Effects, Best Sound, Best Musical score, etc.M: Oh, it seems quite inclusive.W: But not many can get one during their lifetime. And for most award categories, a maximum of five contestants are first nominated by the academy members who are in that particular field. That is, actors select actors, directors select directors and so on. From among these nominees, all academy members select the winner by a secret ballot. The winners are publicly announced at a formal ceremony each spring.M: Yeah. That’s really competitive, but what will each winner get? A certain amount of bonus? W: No. Actually, a goldplated bronze human figure created by the American sculptor George Stanley will be awarded to each winner.M: Oh, I see. Thank you for your explanation. How do you know all this?W: Well, last semester I took a course in the history of film.1. Q: How often are the Academy Awards presented?2. Q: How many contestants are first nominated by academy members for most award categories?3. Q: What does the woman say about the selection of Academy Awards winners?4. Q: What does each Academy Awards winner get?Conversation TwoM: Today is International Women’s Day. But, for all the celebrations, the gender gap, it seems, remains. Now we welcome Laura to join our program to discuss it.W: I’m glad to join the discussion.M: Laura, do you think full equality is really achievable?W: I don’t really think it is. I think women, at the end of the day, have got to decide if they’re going to have a full-time career or be stay-at-home mothers.M: How does it work for you? Do you feel you have to make any sacrifices in terms of both career and family life?W: Well. I’m very lucky. I don’t need much sleep. Not many people have this physical advantage. And I have a helper, who is a male nanny, to do all the jobs around the house.M: Many women aren’t earning a decent wage when they have children. How do you handle it? W: I think if the woman has a career that she actually enjoys or she is the highest earner, the husband can be the main caregiver of the children.M: But do you think that women are experiencing male prejudice?W: Oh, absolutely. My husband, for example, I love him to bits, but he is totally and utterly convinced that it is the woman’s role to bring up the kid.M: Is there any way to get rid of prejudice?W: Well, it is now time for men to look at it. The government and companies should allow paternal leave to encourage men to shoulder the responsibility of taking care of children. It would be a huge advantage.M: That’s a fantastic idea. Laura, good to talk to you.5. Q: What is the dilemma for women according to Laura?6. Q: What physical advantage does the woman have?7. Q: What prejudice does Laura’s husband have against women?8. Q: What did Laura suggest the government and companies do at the end of the conversation? Section BPassage OneOne of the most annoying situations you can face is this: because of circumstances beyond your control, your speech comes at the end of a long, tedious meeting when listeners are weary and want to leave. Often the best response is to trim your speech. As the following incident shows, the audience will be grateful.An all-day professional conference was supposed to end at 3:30 p.m. so that participants would have plenty of daylight for driving back to their hometowns. Unfortunately, most of the speakers on the program exceeded their time limit, and the final speaker found himself starting at 3:8. Without commenting on the insensitivity of the other speakers, he started out by saying, “How many of you would like to leave at 3:30?” Every hand went up. “I will end at 3:30,” he promised. Though it meant omitting most of his prepared remarks, the speaker kept his promise. One of the participants said later: “We appreciated his sensitivity to us and his awareness of the time. And he showed class in not lambasting the earlier speakers who stole most of his time. He showed no anger or resentment.”Here’s a technique to consider: When I am invited to speak at meetings where there are several speakers, I prepare two versions of my speech—a full-length one to use if the other speakers respect their time limits and a shorter version if events dictate that I trim my remarks.9. Q: What happened to the last speechmaker in an all-day professional conference?10. Q: How did the audience respond to the last speechmaker?11. Q: What does the speaker suggest speechmakers do when they are to speak at meetings with several speakers?Passage TwoYour boss asks you to conduct a three-hour workshop, scheduled for a Friday afternoon, to explain important procedures to a group of new employees. What do you do? Do you spend the entire three hours talking? No, not unless you want to put the group to sleep.For long presentations, provide a variety of activities to keep your audience awake and attentive. Here are some suggested activities:Invite audience participation. At various intervals, or even throughout the entire presentation, encourage listeners to ask questions or make comments.Use visual aids whenever possible.Visuals provide variety and sparkle, and they can clarify and reinforce key points.Give coffee or “stretch” breaks at various intervals. A good rule of thumb for marathon sessions is to give a 15-minute break after every 45-minute period, even if the audience does not seem tired. In other words, don’t wait until fatigue sets in. If you wait until the audience is nodding, you might lose their interest for the rest of the day.Call on people at random. If your presentation is in the form of a lecture, you can use the teachers’ technique of calling on people at random to answer questions. This makes every listener energetic because he or she is thinking, “I’d better pay attention because my name might be called next, and I don’t want to be caught daydreaming.” Call the person’s name after you ask the question—If you call the name before the question, everyone in the audience except the designated person might breathe a sigh of relief and fail to pay close attention to the question.Encourage listeners to take notes. Taking notes helps the listeners to stay alert and listen intelligently.12. Q: How can a speechmaker invite audience participation?13. Q: What is one advantage of using visual aids?14. Q: What do we learn about giving audience breaks during long speeches?15. Q: What does the speaker suggest you do when calling on people?Section CLecture OneWhen I enrolled at Pepperdine University in 1974, my mother exercised her parental right to express her angst at my departure. I responded with typical teenage indifference and ignorance. “Mom, it’s only an hour away. What’s the big deal?” “You just wait until you have one of your own,” she cried. “Then you’ll know what I’m feeling.” It has been a little more than a month since my daughter Devin moved into her dorm at Occidental College, and life as I know it has come to an end. Or that’s what it feels like. Mom, you were right.The nest’s empty loneliness is almost unbearable. Why does it hurt so bad? Science has an answer: We are social mammals who experience deep attachment to our fellow friends and family, an evolutionary throwback to our Paleolithic (旧石器时代的) hunter-gatherer days of living in small bands. Bonding unified the group, aiding survival in harsh climes and against unforgiving enemies. Attachment between parents and offspring assured that there is no one better equipped to look after the future survival of your genes than yourself.The empty-nest syndrome is real, but there is good news for this and all forms of loss and grief. According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we are not very good at forecasting our unhappiness. Most of us think that we would be miserable for a very long time. Gilbert calls this the durability bias, an emotional misunderstanding.The durability bias and the failure to recognize the power of our emotional immune systems lead us to overestimate how depressed we will feel and for how long, and to underestimate how quickly we will snap out of it and feel better.For me, taking the long view helps. How long? Deep time. Evolutionary time, in which 6,895 days represent a mere 0.000000005% of the 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth.Each of us parents makes one small contribution to the evolutionary imperative of life’s continuity from one generation to the next without a single gap, an unbroken link over the eons (永久).16. Q: What message does the speaker want to express by telling us her experience?17. Q: From the point of science, why do parents give great love to their children?18. Q: What kind of role do parents play in the human history?Lecture TwoNow the typical father spends about seven hours per week in “primary child care”, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize it’s more than twice as much as in 1965. Roughly 60% of male high school students told researchers they planned to cut their work hours when they become dads; the recession rushes the trend, as men get laid off at three times the rate of women and the division of labor gets a sudden jolt.But now women show an ambivalence (矛盾心理) about male involvement. They diminish with faint praise; dads still get points for returning children at the end of the day with all their limbs in place. This kind of maternal superiority only really took hold in the modern age, when we turned parenting into a profession with its own implicit peer-review boards and competitive frenzy. Rather than uniting to promote a culture that would make parenting easier for everyone, we have wasted a huge amount of energy and airspace on fighting among ourselves over what constitutes the perfect balance between work and home. “I avoid old friends on Facebook,” reads the post on Truemomconfessions. Com “because when I compare my life to theirs, I am so ashamed of where I am.”But when did you last read about the Daddy Wars? Men compete against one another in every arena except this one, maybe out of indifference, but more often out of humility. Most fathers I know make fun of themselves, and of the mystery of it all, as though content that being a parent is a skill you practice but never master. There is much doubt, but less guilt. Sam Apple calls American Fatherhood “the longest-running identity crisis of all time”, but largely refrains from offering fellow new fathers any advice—though in the course of his journey, he encounters so much nonsense on how to Build Better Children that one develops a dislike to the whole notion of trying to re-engineer them at all.As we create this new domestic economy, the rising generation of mothers may see the value in trading control for collaboration and lighten up a little, both with Dad and one another. You already feel the rising objection against hyper-parenting; I suspect the less possessive we are, the less obsessive we’ll be.19. Q: What influence has the economic downturn exerted?20. Q: What is the current situation concerning child care in a family, according to the passage?21. Q: What does the speaker think of the debate over the constitution of the family-work balance?22. Q: What does the speaker advise mothers to do at the end of the passage?Lecture ThreeListen up, all ye coeds (男女同校的女生): the dress code on campus is about to kick up a notch (更进一步). In the past year, a number of top financial professionals have decided to interchange toxic assets and big acquisitions for academia.Greg Fleming, former president of Merrill Lynch, is probably the highest-ranking Wall Streeter to make the move so far. Earlier this year, after Merrill was acquired by Bank of America, Fleming decided to exit the newly combined firm for Yale Law School. This semester, he is teaching a class that brings financial professionals to New Haven to explain the economic events of the past year—and the class is drawing praise not just from students but other teachers.Fleming is not alone. Frank Yeary, Citigroup’s former head of mergers and acquisitions, left the bank last summer to become a vice chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley. Successful Wall Streeters have long maintained ties to their former universities, especially through large donations. One example: the Weill Cornell Medical College is named after the former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill. They also regularly serve on university boards and help manage endowments.But relatively few Wall Streeters over the years have decided to give up the fat paychecks and luxury privilege of high finance for the world of education. Those who did often had midlevel jobs on Wall Street or were nearing retirement. That seems to be changing.Today, many Wall Streeters leaving for dormitory life are in their mid-40s and are leaving top jobs at their firms. Even in an industry where early retirement is common, Fleming and other bankers are likely walking away from seven-figure paychecks. Undoubtedly, too, some will return.“You get a tiny office, none of your colleagues talk to you for a while, and you have to figure out what to say to students for 36 hours a semester,” says Roy Smith, who left Goldman 21 years ago to become a professor at New York University. “It’s hard work for little pay. ”Of course, the Wall Street professionals are also leaving behind the most uncertain time in finance in their careers. The credit crunch(信贷紧缩) has effectively shuttered a number of markets and put a halt to most mergers, leaving some on Wall Street with little to do. What’s more, in the past year, financial professionals have gone from masters of the universe to subjects of ridicule. That makes now a good time to switch to a profession that seems more beneficial to society, even to Wall Streeters.23. Q: How do the successful Wall Streeters keep ties with their former universities?24. Q: What change has happened among today’s Wall Streeters leaving for universities?25. Q: What difficulty may the financial professionals leaving for universities meet, according to Roy Smith?Model Test TwoSection AConversation OneW: Today, I’m interviewing Alex about her feelings on how people can help save the environment. So, Alex, how can we save the environment?M: By saving water.W: Well, how can we do that?M: By not using too much water when we wash dishes, take a bath, and when we do other things, like watering the plants outside.W: Oh, I think I can do that. What else?M: When drinking or eating something outside, you should keep the garbage until you find a trashcan to put it in because littering makes our planet dirty. Do you like seeing trash all over the ground?W: No, I don’t. Do you have any final suggestions?M: Yes. We shouldn’t waste paper because trees are being cut down to make the paper. By recycling paper, we save the forests where animals live.W: So, how can children recycle paper, I mean, everyday?M: Well, for example, when I was in kindergarten, I used to save the newspapers so that I could make things out of them, like paper trees, instead of just throwing them away. Now, the children inour neighborhood collect newspapers once a month to take them to a recycling center.W: That’s great. Well, thanks Alex for your ideas.1. Q: According to the man, what is the method to save water?2. Q: Why does the man suggest people save paper?3. Q: What can children do to recycle paper according to the man?4. Q: What do the two speakers mainly talk about?Conversation TwoM: Hayley Levine is a flight attendant for First Choice Airways. What made you want to be a flight attendant?W: I always wanted to travel. I wanted to see the world.M: What kind of training did you have?W: If you pass the interview, you go on to your training which is five weeks: first week’s all about customer service, relations, things like that, and then you go on to all your safety training which is four weeks’ intensive training, and then you’re also quite well trained on immediate care. If something medical happens up in the air, you need to be trained to deal with it quickly, efficiently. M: What kind of person do you think the airlines are looking for? I mean what kind of person makes a good flight attendant?W: I think they’re looking for someone who is, quite competent in what they do, quite confident, just someone who’s a team player really.M: Tell me, what do you think are good and bad sides of the job?W: Good sides, obviously I get to see the world pretty much for free.Bad sides would be sick bags, probably, and obviously it’s really gruelling on your social life, it’s more like a way of living than a job.M: Are there any other downsides?W: Probably the jet lag, that’s quite bad.M: Have you got any tips for dealing with jet lag?W: Tips? I don’t wear a watch. Sometimes that helps. And if you’re going sort of east, just try and stay up, just try and fight the jet lag, that’s the best way.5. Q: What do we learn about the training of a flight attendant?6. Q: What kind of person can make a good flight attendant?7. Q: What does the woman say about the bad side of being a flight attendant?8. Q: What suggestion does the woman give to deal with jet lag?Section BPassage OneTo ensure that no one is excluded, use a sign-language interpreter for deaf listeners and a foreign-language interpreter for non-English-speaking listeners. Here are ways to enhance the quality of the transmission of your message:Even an experienced interpreter can’t be expected to smoothly and accurately render all of your terms and phrases on the spur of the moment. Therefore, you should provide a copy of your outline in advance to help him or her prepare.If possible, ask him or her to rehearse with you several times, and to alert you if any elements in your speech are likely to be misunderstood. In your opening remarks, introduce the interpreter to the audience and express your appreciation for his or her assistance.When using a foreign-language interpreter, you will probably employ the popular continuous interpretation method, in which you and the interpreter take turns. Say only a few sentences at a time, so that neither language group gets weary of waiting its turn. A less-frequent method is simultaneous interpretation, in which your words are rendered into a separate microphone a few seconds later for listeners wearing headphones. At large international meetings, a speech may be rendered into many languages simultaneously.To demonstrate your desire to connect with all listeners, learn a few words and phrases from sign language and/or a foreign language to sprinkle into your presentation.Even if all listeners are using the services of a sign-language interpreter, you should still talk directly to the listeners, not to the interpreter.9. Q: What should you do when you work with interpreters?10. Q: What should you do during the continuous interpretation?11. Q: What behavior is not welcomed when you work with interpreters during a speech? Passage TwoKandy Theis, an employee of the Des Moines Water Works, became ill with cancer a few years ago, and a series of operations forced him to use up all his sick leave. He asked the company to extend the number of sick days that he could take, but management declined, citing soaring health insurance costs.At this point, a group of fellow employees got together to try to find a solution to the problem. After a brainstorming session, the group came up with a clever plan: It would ask the company to allow employees to donate their own sick leave days to Theis.The group approached management, which approved the idea and changed its regulations to allow sick leave transfers. Twenty-five workers signed up immediately to give Theis some of their sick leave.This creative solution to a human problem illustrates the value of small groups. Members of small groups can pool their resources, ideas, and labor; they can catch and correct errors that might slip past an individual. “Group IQ”—a term used by Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg—is often higher than individual IQs.While the superiority of small groups over individuals is obvious, small groups also have advantages over large groups of people: They act with greater quickness, flexibility, and resourcefulness. Large corporations such as Federal Express, Motorola, Xerox, and Wal-Mart have learned that putting employees into small task forces is the most effective way to compete successfully in today’s global economy. When General Motors set up a new car division—Saturn—it gave its teams of workers an extraordinary amount of power to make decisions about production and sales. Saturn soon became GM’s most profitable division.12. Q: What would Theis’ colleagues ask the company to do to solve his problem?13. Q: What does the case of solving Theis’ problem illustrate?14. Q: What advantages do small groups have over large groups?15. Q: What can we learn about Saturn in General Motors?Section CLecture OneEarly parenting choices are never clear-cut, and deciding whether to allow your infant to watch television or DVDs ranks as one of the more perplexing.Thanks to marketing claims for TV shows and DVDs created for babies, many parents believe that watching educational programming will stimulate infants’ brains and actually promote learning. It’s a seductive line of reasoning. Certainly, exposing a baby to brain-engaging DVDs will put him on an early path to becoming, well, a baby Einstein, right? Maybe not. (16)The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television time for babies younger than 2, in large part because no studies have yet established that TV exposure improves babies’ learning. Now a new study published in the current issue of Pediatrics confirms that position.Marie Evans Schmidt, a research associate at the Center on Media & Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston, studied more than 800 youngsters from birth to 3 years, recording the time they spent watching television or DVDs as reported by their mothers, as well as their performance on language and motor-skill tests.In her initial analysis, Schmidt found that babies who spent more time in front of the TV performed worse on language and motor-skill tests at age 3 than those who watched less. But once Schmidt and her team controlled for other factors—the mother’s educational status and household income—the relationship between TV-viewing and cognitive development disappeared. That means that TV-viewing alone did not appear to influence babies’ brain development; a parent’s education and finances mattered more.This study is only the second to track TV-viewing and cognitive development in infants over time. Its results deviate from those of the other longitudinal (纵向的) study, conducted by Dr. Dimitri Christakis at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, which found that DVD-viewing hindered babies’ ability to learn vocabulary.TV exposure in babies younger than 2 doesn’t do any good, Schmidt and Christakis agree. But does that mean a few minutes in front of the TV will sentence a baby to remedial classes for the rest of his life? “What I tell parents is ‘Ask yourself why you’re having your baby watch TV,’ ”says Christakis. “If you absolutely need a break to take a shower or make dinner, then therisks are quite low. But if you are doing it because you think it’s actually good for your child’s brain, then you need to rethink that, because there is no evidence of benefit and certainly a risk of harm at high viewing levels. ”16. Q: Why does the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend no television time for babies younger than 2?17. Q: What did Schmidt find through her first analysis of her research?18. Q: What factors may influence babies’ brain development more according to Schmidt and her team?Lecture TwoMaybe you bought the pizza instead of the salad. Or are sipping soda instead of water. Perhaps you decided once again to delay the beginning of your long-planned exercise routine. Every day there are hundreds of seemingly trivial decisions that individually may not mean a whole lot but in combination can add or deduct a substantial amount of time to or from our lives. As a doctor, I am convinced that most people know the healthier choice; they just need frequent reminders to make it. And that is exactly what some new research has confirmed.According to a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, simple e-mail reminders to eat more healthfully or increase physical activity had a significant effect on the recipients’ behavior. Out of 787 office workers who participated in the study, 351 were randomly selected to receive weekly e-mails and midweek reminders generated by a cost-effective, easily measurable program called ALIVE! (A Lifestyle Intervention via E-mail). E-mail recipients got to choose one of three focus areas: boosting physical activity, increasing fruit and vegetable intake or decreasing sugars and saturated (饱和的) fats. The e-mails were brief and contained one small goal a week, such as going for a walk during a coffee break, ordering a salad with toasted chicken for lunch or avoiding the cupcakes in the conference room.These little suggestions worked. By the end of the 16-week study, which was conducted by Kaiser Permanente and NutritionQuest and funded in part by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, participants who received the physical-activity e-mails increased their exercise lifestyle by an hour a week more than the control group had.Might not seem like much, but the truth is, small changes can make a big difference in your health. Studies show that switching from butter to soft margarine (人造奶油) reduces your bad cholesterol (胆固醇)—and by extension your risk of getting heart disease—10%. So come up with a simple step, like “Eat seven colors of fruits and vegetables tomorrow,” and program it into your electronic calendar as a recurring reminder. This new goal just became part of your job description. Your bonus at the end of the year? A longer, healthier life.19. Q: What does the speaker say when people facing the healthier choice?20. Q: What is the purpose of the program called ALIVE?21. Q: What would be the ideal effect of the physical-activity e-mails as a reminder?22. Q: What will happen if people eat soft margarine instead of butter?Lecture ThreeLosing your job can make you feel awful. Whether you’re fired or laid-off, joining the ranks of the unemployed is not exactly a feel-good event. You don’t need a study to tell you that.But what impact does losing a job have on your health? Could a layoff send a perfectly healthy person into a downward spiral of sickness? It’s possible, says Kate Strully, a sociologist at State University of New York in Albany. In her new study published in the journal Demography, Strully analyzed a variety of job loss situations—including being fired or laid off or losing a job after the entire company shut down—and found that job loss may indeed trigger serious physical and physiological illness.Strully used a nationally representative and continually updated data set known as the U. S. Panel of Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which surveys people around the country each year on their employment status and their self-reports of health, among other things. Strully used data from 1999, 2001 and 2003 to track people’s job status and the impact on each person’s health 18 months later. Since previous studies on employment and health suffered from a chicken-or-egg puzzle—researchers could never be sure whether the stresses and strains of unemployment led to poorer health, or whether people’s poor health led to missed work days and lower productivity, which contributed to job loss—Strully focused on people who reported having lost their job due to factors out of their control, such as the entire company shutting its doors.。
