听力原文(短文理解)高级英语教程.doc

短文理解（听力原文）Passage 1 Welcome to the Summer Festival Program. Weofferthreemajoreventstoday: Youth Celebrations, River Festival and Songs of Summer. If you love to dance, Youth Celebrations may be your choice. Students from various countries including Canada, America and Australia are each performing three dance pieces. If you like to stay by the river, River Festival will offer you a day of fun on the river bank, followed by fireworks in the evening. For music lovers, Songs of Summer brings you the Hunton Group who will perform old and new songs all about the summer. Hope everyone will have a good time. Passage 2In the next few minutes, Id like to tell you next weeks plan for my writing class because Im going to attend a meeting in London and wont be here from Tuesday to Friday. Professor Brown is going to be with you. Remember next Friday youll have a mid-term exam. On Thursday you wont have classes as we usually do. Instead, I will arrange a review section. You may either come to the class or stay in your door. But coming to the class will be a good idea if you are worried about the exam. Professor Brown will be here to answer your questions. So again remember: free choices next Thursday, mid-term exam Friday.Passage 3Fire can help people in many ways. But it can also be very harmful. Fire can make water hot and house warm, give light and cook food. But fire can burn things, too. It can make trees, houses, animals and other things catch fire. If some people cant run away from fire, it can kill them. This happens in every country every year. Sometimes big fire can burn forests. A month ago, a large forest fire broke out in Yunnan Province. It lasted nearly half a month. The forest in Heilongjiang Province and the grassland in Inner Mongolia caught fire in May, 2006. After more than ten days fight, over 30,000 people and soldiers put out the fire at last. Nobody knows clearly when people began to make fire, but there are many interesting stories about the first time a man or a woman started a fire. One story from Australia tells about a man who went to the sun and brought fire down a long time ago. Today people know how to make a fire with matches. Children sometimes like to play with them. But matches can be very dangerous. The match can burn a piece of paper and then it can burn a house. A small fire can become a big fire, and destroy many things. Fire kills many people every year. So you must be careful with fire.Passage 4Millions of words have been written about young people in the United States. There are reasons for this great interest in the ideas, feelings, and actions of youth.Today there are about seven million Americans in colleges and universities. Young persons under twenty-five make up nearly half of the American population. Many of these will soon be in charge of the nation. Naturally their ideas are important to everyone in the country, and it is necessary for older people to understand what they think and feel.College students today have strong opinions about right and wrong. They are deeply interested in making a better life for all people, especially for the lives of their parents. It is hard for them to see what is right and good in the older ways. As a result, there is often a lot of trouble in American families. Passage 5Every child has his own dream. Every child hopes to be an adult. However, is it truly like what they imagine? As a boy who lives in modern times and in a modern city, I feel greater pressure on me with the citys development. Although we seldom worry about money, we still have some a lot of problems, such as competition among classmates and expectations from parents. These experiences are very helpfulto our future. But in fact, they really give me a lot of pressure. I still clearly remember the happiness of my childhood. Unluckily we had to face the fact with time passing by. We began tofeel this invisible (无形的) pressure come upon us. We get up before sunrise andreturn after sunset. We work and study like an adult, even harder. What we do is in order to get an excellent mark. Growing up is completely boring, but we musttry to find happiness while growing up. I think friendship among our friends, the support from our parents and the encouragement from our teachers can help us. Why not enjoy the pleasure of growing up?Passage 6In every language there are some words. These words have some interesting stories behind them. The word “sandwich”,for example,is very common in English. If we want to know the story behind it,we must know something about an English noble man. His name is called Sandwich. Sandwich lived in the 18th century. He was rich,but he liked to play cards for money.He often played for 24 hours and did not even stop to have his meals.He let his servants bring some meat and bread and played while eating.He put the meat between two pieces of bread and he held the food in his left hand whenhe played with his right hand.People liked sandwichs idea and began to eat bread and meat this way. From the name of the man sandwich,we have the word “sandwich” today.Passage 7From a plane we can see the fields, cities, mountains or seas below. If we go into space, we see more and more of the earth. People and man-made satellites have been sent out into space to look at the earth carefully and people have learnt more about the earth in the last few years. The sea looks very beautiful when the sun is shining on it: But it can be very terrible when there is a strong wind. The sea is very big. It nearly covers three quarters of the earth. The sea is also very deep in some places. There is one place and at that place the sea is about l1 kilometers deep. The highest mountain in the world is about 9 kilometers high. If that mountain was put into the sea at that place, there would be still 2 kilometers of water above it! In most parts of the sea, there are many kinds of fishes and plants. Some live near the top of the sea. Others live deep down. There are also a lot of small living things, and lots of fishes live by eating them. The sea can be very cold. When people go down, the sea becomes colder and colder. Only some men can go down into the deep sea. But in 1970, five women scientists lived in the deep sea for fourteen days.Passage 8Hi, everybody! Welcome to our newly-opened Richards Cinema Bookstore!Now let me introduce to you some of the new film books in our store.Are you Chinese film fans? OK, here comes the latest 25 New Takes about Chinese films. It is a collection of 25 fresh readings of different Chinese films from the 1930s to the present. In recent years, Chinese filmsare very popular in the States, such as Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon, Hero, and Flowers of Shanghai.Do you like French films? Well, here is The French Cinema Book. It covers French films from the 1890s to the beginning of the 21st century. It is written for all lovers of French cinema: students and teachers,specialists and fans, and so on.Maybe you are Indian film fans and star-chasers. Then here is Encyclopedia of IndianCinema. The book is a complete introduction to all the best Indian films. It also offers a full list of names of the famous and successful film stars in the past ten years. You know, the Indian film industry is the largestin the world after our Hollywood.If you like British films, we have The British Cinema Book. It is a good review of British cinema. Thisbook contains a good many nice pictures.In our bookstore, you can also find books about Mexican, Japanese, Australian, German and Italian films.Well, please help yourselves to some coffee or tea, and have a good time here!Passage 9Everybody can suffer from stress. No matter what your age is, you can feel stressed out by thingsthat are happening in your life. Teenagers, however, have many more opportunities to get stressed than people in any other age group. Being a teenager is hard. You are not a child any more, but you are not an adult, even though you have to deal with some very grown-up problems and decisions. Families can be one ofthe biggest causes of stress, such as problems with parents at home, or with brothers and sisters. Teenagersalso have a lot of stress from school, either from their teachers or from their friends. Some teenagers also feel stressed about choosing their education after high school. Getting a place at a university can bevery difficult and some cannot afford to go to university. The stress about getting a job when finishingschool is hard for some teenagers. There are so many young people finishing school and not enough jobs for them. Sadly, there is nothing we can do to remove these causes of stress from the lives of teenagers,but you can learn the best way to deal with it. Talking to people is one of the best ways to deal with stress. It may sound simple, but it is true. A problem shared is a problem halved.Passage 10Reading newspapers has become an important part of everyday life. Some people read newspapers as the first thing to do in the morning. Others read newspapers as soon as they have free time during the day so that they can learn what is happening in the world.Sometimes, we do not have enough time to read all the news carefully, so we just take a quick look at the front page. At other times, we may be in such a hurry that we only have a few minutes to look at the headlines of the passage.Newspapers can be found everywhere in the world. We can get many different kinds of newspapers in big cities, but in some mountain villages we can see few newspapers. Some newspapers are published once a week, but most of the papers are published once a day with many pages, some even published twice a day! You know different people enjoy reading different newspapers. Some like world news, and others prefer short stories. They just choose what they are interested in.Today newspapers in English have the largest numbers of readers in the world. The English language is so popular that many Chinese students are reading English newspapers such as China Daily or 2lst Century. Also they bring us more and more information with Internet.Passage 11Mr. Young owned his own business and worked very hard. His wife was afraid that he would get sick if he continued like that, so she often tried to get him to take a vacation. At last she managed to persuade him to do this. But she was afraid that he might not be able to enjoy his holiday quietly, so before they left, Mrs. Young went to see her husbands secretary. She said to her. My husband needs a vacation very much, so whatever happens, please dont bother him with telephone or letters about business problems while we are away. Just wait till we get back. After Mr. and Mrs. Young had been away for about a week, Mr. Young received a letter from his secretary which said, Something terrible happened to your business, but Im not going to bother you with it now while you are enjoying your holiday.Passage 12One kind of vacation that many Americans enjoy is camping. Each summer millions of Americans drive to the countryside where they find places to camp. The national parks, many of which are in the mountains, are favorite camping places. Campers enjoy the fresh air, the lakes and the forests which they find in these parks. Campers hike, swim and fish. They can also find many kinds of animals and plants in the parks. Mostly, campers relax. They enjoy a change from their busy lives in the city. Some campers have trailers which they drive or pull behind their cars to their camp sites. Trailers are like houses on wheels. They have many conveniences which people have in their homes, such as electricity and hot water. But most campers dont have trailers. They camp in tents which they set up in their camp sites. Campers in tents dont have the conveniences that campers in trailers have. Tent campers enjoy a very simple life.Passage 13In the next few decades, people are going to travel very differently from the way they do today. Everyone is going to drive electrically-powered cars, so in the few years, people wont worry about running out of gas. Some of the large automobile companies are really moving ahead with this new technology. F&C Motors, a major auto company, for example, is holding a press conference next week. After the press conference, the company will present its new electronically-operated models. Transportation in the future wont be limited to the ground, many people predict that traffic will quickly move to the sky. In the coming years, instead of radio reports about road conditions and highway traffic, news reports will talk about traffic jams in the sky. But the sky isnt the limit. In the future, you will probably even be able to take a trip to the moon. Instead of listening to regular airplane announcements, you will hear someone say: The spacecraft to the moon leaves in 10 minutes. Please check your equipment. And remember no more than 10 ounces of carry-on baggage are allowed.Passage 14All the housewives who went to the supermarket had one great ambition: to be the lucky customer who did not have to pay for her shopping. For this was what the notice just inside the entrance promised. It said:“Remember, once a week, one of our customers gets free groceries. This may be your lucky day!”For several weeks Mrs. Edwards hoped, like many of her friends, to be the lucky customer. Unlike her friends, she never gave up hope. The cupboards in her kitchen were full of things, which she did not need. In vain her husband tried to dissuade her. She dreamed of the day when the manager of the supermarket would approach her and say:“Madam, this is your lucky day. Everything in your basket is free.”One Friday morning, after she had finished her shopping and had taken it to her car, she found that she had forgotten to buy tea. She dashed back to the supermarket, got the tea and went towards the cash desk. As she did so, she saw the manager of the supermarket approach her.“Madam,”he said, holding out his hand,“I want to congratulate you! You are the lucky customer and everything in your basket is free!”Passage 15Do you have a tough math test coming up? Then listen to some classical piano music just before the test. You might and up with a higher score. Researchers at a university in California conducted an experiment. They asked a group of college students to listen to some piano music by a famous 18th century composer before taking a math test. They were surprised to find that the students scores jumped 8 to 9 points. The music seems to excite nerve activities in the brain; similar to the activity that occurs when a person is figuring out a math problem. However, the scientists warn before you get too excited about applying this method to your math test. You should remember that brain exciting effects last only 10 or 15 minutes. Would rock music work as well as the piano music did? No, the scientists say. In fact, the less complex music might even interfere with the brains reasoning ability.Passage 16I had to go to Amsterdam last week for a conference. I arrived at the airport in plenty of time and checked in. But I only had one small case, so I decided to take in on the plane as hand-luggage.As the flight was not due to board for 45 minutes, I went to a cafe, sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. While I was sitting there, drinking my coffee and reading the paper, I was vaguely aware of a woman and her child coming to sit at the next table. I did not pay much attention to them though. And when my flight was called, I reached for my case and left. An hour later, the plane was in the air and I decided to look at the conference program to see what I wanted to attend. Imagine my horror when I opened the case and found it was full of picture books and childrens toys. And imagine what the women must have thought about a case full of mens clothes and scientific papers. Passage 17Our family is trying to decide where to go for our vacation this summer. Our son Tom wants to go to Yellow Stone Park again to see the bears. We did that last summer, and what an experience it was! When we got there we put up our tent and went to explore. As we returned, we heard our daughter Susie cry out and then we saw a bear enter our camp. Tom wanted his father to chase him away. His father said:“No, its dangerous to chase a bear. And dont let him chase you.”Susie said.“What shall we do? May be we ought to climb a tree. Tom said: “No, weve got to get him out of there. He might go to sleep in our tent.” Maybe we could make him leave if we put some honey outside for him to eat. Susie suggested. Then I said: How are you going to get the honey? Its in the tent. We watched the bear enter the tent and heard him upset everything inside.“Its foolish for us to try to catch him.”said my husband. Leave him alone and wait for him to come out. We waited but the bear stayed inside. We had to sleep in the car.Passage 18 When you turn on the radio, you hear an advertisement. When you watch television, you hear andsee an advertisement. If you turn the pages of a newspaper or magazine, again you find an advertisement. If you walk down the street, youll see one advertising board after another. All day, every day, people who want to sell you something compete to catch your attention. As a result, advertisements are almosteverywhere. In the West, advertisements are the fuel that makes mass media work. The government does not give money to mass media, such as TV stations, newspapers, magazines, and radio stations. They are all owned privately. So where doesthe money come from? From advertisements. Without advertisements, there would not be these privatebusinesses. Have you ever asked yourself what advertising is? Through the years, people have given differentanswers to the qu