【英语考试托福】TPO15听力文本 共（10页）

1、tpo tpo tpo tpo 15151515 listening listening listening listening part part part partconversation conversation conversation conversation 1 1 1 1narrator: listen to a conversation between a student and the faculty advisor of thecampus newspaper .student hi! i talked to someone on the phone a couple of

2、 weeks ago, anna , ithink it was?advisorim anna, the faculty advisorstudent oh, great! im peter murphy. you probably dont r e member me, but advisorno! no! i remember you . youre interested in working for the paper.student yeah, as a reporter .advisorthats right. youre taking a jo urnalism class and

3、 you ve done somereporting before in high school, right?student wow, you have a good memory.advisorwell we haven t had many students applying lately so so anyway, youstill want to do some reporting for us?student yeah, if you have room for me on the staff .advisorwell we always need more reporters,

4、but you know, we dont payanything, right?student yeah, i know, but i huh. . id like the experience. it would look good onmy resume .advisorabsolutely! lets see . i think i told you that we ask prospective reportersto turn in some outlines for possible articles .studentyeah, i sent them in about a we

5、ek ago, but i havent heard anything backyet, so, so i thought id stop by and see, but i guess you havent looked atthem yet .advisoroh, max, the news editor. he looks a t all the submissionsstudent oh , so he hasnt made any decision about me yet? advisorwell i just got here a few minutes ago. havent

6、been in for a couple ofdays. just give me a second to check my e-mail. uh here is a messagefrom max. let s see. well it seems you ve really impressed him. he says itwould be wonderful if you could join our staff.student oh, great! when can i start?advisorweii, you turned in an outline on something t

7、o do with the physicsdepartment?student yeah, theyre trying to come up with ways to get more students to taketheir introductory courses.advisorright, well , apparently, nobody else is covering that story , so he wantsyou to follow up on it.student ok. uh wha t the other outline i sent in, about the

8、proposed increase intuition fees?advisoroh, it lo oks like weve got that coveredstudent so i am starting with an article about the physics department. i guess idbetter get to work. do you have any advice on how i should cover thestory?advisorwell, max will want to talk to you but i am sure he will t

9、ell you to findout things like why the physics departments worried about enrollment.has the number of students been getting smaller in recent years? byhow much? what kinds of plans are they considering to address thisproblem?studentright, some of those issues are already in what i proposed .advisora

10、nd youll want to do some interviews, you know, what do the professorsthink 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 .advisorright, hell cover everything you need to know to be a report e r for us .can you come back this af

11、ternoon? he will be here until 5 oclock .lecture lecture lecture lecture 1 1 1 1narrator: listen to part of a lecture in a psychology classprofessor for decades, psychologists have been looking at our ability to performtasks while other things are going on, how we are able to keep frombeing distract

12、ed and what the conditi ons for good concentration are. aslong ago as 1982, researchers came up with something call ed the cfq -the cognitive failures questionnaire. this questionnaire asks people torate themselves according to how often they get distracted in differentsituations, like h um . forget

13、ti ng to save a computer file because theyhad something else on their mind or missing a speed limit sign on theroad. john?johnive lost my share of computer files, but not because i m easily distracted.i just forget to save them.professor and thats part of the problem with th e cfq. it doesn t take o

14、ther factorsinto account enough, like forgetfulness. plus you really can t say you aregetting objective scientific results from a subjective questionnaire wherepeople report on themselves. s o it s no surprise that someoneattempted to design an objective way to measure distraction. i t s asimple com

15、puter game designed by a psychologist named, nilli lavie. inlavie s game, people watch as the letters n and x appear and disappearin a certain area on the computer screen. every time they see an n, theypress one key, and every time they see an x they press another, exceptother letters also start app

16、earing in the surrounding area of the screenwith increasing frequency which creates a distraction and makes the taskmore difficult. lavie observed that people s reaction time slowed asthese distractions increased.student 2 well that s not too surprising, isn t it?professor no, its not. its the next

17、part of the experiment that was surprising.when the difficulty really increased, when the screen filled up withletters, people got better al spotting the xs and ns . what do you thinkthat happened?johnwell, maybe when we are really concentrating, we just dont perceiveirrelevant information . maybe w

18、e just dont take it in, you know?professor yes, and thats one of the hypotheses that was proposed, that the brainsimply doesnt admit the unimportant information. the secondh ypothesis is that, yes, we do perceive everything, but the braincategorizes the information, and whatever is not relevant to w

19、hat we areconcentrating on gets treated as low priority. so lavie did anotherexperiment, designed to look at the ability to concentrate better in theface of increased difficulty. this time she used brain scanning equipmentto monitor activity in a certain part of the brain, the area called v5,which i

20、s part of the visual cortex, the part of our brains that processesvisual stimuli .v5 is the area of the visual cortex thats responsible for the sensation ofmovement. once again, lavie gave people a computer-based task to do.they have to distinguish between words in upper and lower-case lettersor eve

21、n harder, they had to count the number of syllables in differentwords. this time the distraction was a moving star f i el d in thebackground, you know, where h looks like you are moving through space,passing stars. normally area of v5 would be stimulated as those movingstars are perceived and sure e

22、nough, lavie found that during the taskarea of v5 was active, so people were aware of the moving star field.that means people were not blocking out the distraction.studentso doesnt that mean that the first hypothesis y ou mentioned w as wr o ng,the one that says we dont even perceive irrelevant info

23、rmation when weare concentrating?professor yes thats right, up to a point, bu t that s not all. lavie also discovered thatas she made the task more difficult , v5 became less a ctive, so thatmeans that now people weren t really noticing the star field at all. thatwas quite a surprise and it approved

24、 that the second hypothesis thatwe do perceive eve rything all the time but the brain categorizesdistractions differently, well, that wasnt true eith er. lavie thinks thesolution lies in the brain s ability to accept or ignore visual information.she thinks its capacity is limited. i t s like a highw

25、ay. w hen there are toomany cars, traffic is sto pp e d. no one can get on. s o when the brain isloaded to capacity, no new distractions can be perceived . now that maybe the correct conclusion for visual distractions, but more research isneeded to tell us how the brain deals with, say, the distract

26、ions of solvinga math problem when we are hungry or when someone is singing in thenext room.lecture 2narrator: listen to part of a lecture in a geology class .professor as geologists , we examine layers of sediment on the earth s surface toapproximate the dates of past geologic time periods. ah sedi

27、ment as youknow i s material like sand , gravel, fossil fragments that is transported bynatural processes like win d , water flow or the movement of glaciers .so sediment is transported and then deposited and it forms layers on theearth s surface over time. we examine these layers to learn aboutdiff

28、erent ge ologic time periods including when they began and ended.for example, from about 1.8 million years ago to around 11 thousandyears ago was the pleistocene epic. the pleistocene epic was an ice age.during this epic, sediment was made by the kind of erosion andwe athering that happens when the

29、climate is colder, and part of thosesediments are fossils of plants and animals that lived at that time.the holocene epic followed the pleistoce ne epic when the earth sclimate warmed up around 11 thousand years ago. the holocene e pic ischaracterized by different sediments, ones that form when the

30、climate iswarme r. because the climate changed, the types of plants and animalschanged also. holocene sediments contain remnants of more recentplants and animals, so its pretty easy to diffe rentiate geologicallybetween these two epics.now there is growing evidence that the presence of humans has al

31、teredthe earth so much that a new epic of geologic history has began theanthropocene epic, a new human-influe nced epic. t his idea that we veentered a new anthro-pocene epic was first proposed in 2002. t he ideais that around the year 1800 ce the human population became largeenough, around a billio

32、n people, that its activities started altering theenvironment. t his was also the time of the industrial revolution, whichbrought a tremendous increase in the use of fossil fuels such coal. theexploitation of fossil fuels has brought planet wide developments:industrialization, construction, uh, mass

33、 transport. and thesedevelopments have caused major changes like additional erosion of theearth s surface and deforestation. also, things like the damming of rivers ,has caused increased sediment production, not to mention the additionof more carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere .naturally a

34、ll these changes show up in recent sediments. and thesesediments are quite different from pre year 1800 sediment layers.interestingly theres some speculation that h umans started having amajor impact on earth much earlier, about 8000 years ago. thats whenagriculture was becoming widespread. early fa

35、rmers started clearingforests and livestock produced a lot of extra methane. but i want tostress this is just a hypothesis. the idea that early humans could havehad such a major effect, well im just not sure we can compare it withthe industrial age. geologists in the far future will be able t o exam

36、ine thesediment being laid down today, whereas right now we can say that yes,human impact on the earth is clear: itll be future researchers who havea better perspective and will be able to really draw a line between theholocene and the anthropocene epics.conversation 2narratorlisten to part of a con

37、versation between a student and her biology .professorhi 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 everyweekend, we prac

38、tice 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 ididn t always succeed, was getting my studying in during soccer season.

39、are you having a similar samantha no, i i really do make time to study. a nd i actually study more for thisclass than i do for all my other classes. b ut i didn t see the grade iexpected on my mid-term exam, which is why i came by.professor well, you didnt do badly on the exam, but i agree it did no

40、t reflect yourpotential. i say this because your work on the lab project was exemplary.i was so impressed with the way you handle the microscope and thesamples of onion cells, and with how carefully you observed anddiagramed and interpreted each stage of cell division. and i dont thinkyou could have

41、 done that if you hadnt 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 theexamprofessor so what happened?samantha i just sort of blanked out, i guess. i had a hard time reme

42、mbering details.it was so frustrating.professor alright, lets back up. you say you studied, where, at home?samantha at my kitchen table actually .professor and thats supposed to be a quiet environment?samantha not exactly. my brother and parents try to keep it down when i amstudying, but the phone p

43、retty 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 atest, you know, so everything is fresh in my mind. i studied six straighthours the night before the mid-t

44、erm exam . t hat s why i expected to doso much better.professor oh ok. y ou know that studying six consecutive hours is not equivalent tostudying one hour a day for six days.samantha it isn t?professor no. there is research that shows that after about an hour of intensefocus, your brain needs a brea

45、k. it needs to, you know, shift gears a little.your brains ability to absorb information starts to decline after about thefirst 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, itd bemuch better than waiting until t

46、he night before an exam to try andabsorb all those details .samantha oh, i didnt realize .professor think of your brain as: a muscle. if you didnt practice regularly with yourtrack team, and then tried to squeeze in three weeks worth of runningpractice just the day before a track meet, how well do y

47、ou think youdperform in your races?lecture 3narrator: listen to part of a lecture in an art history class .professor: now in europe in the middle ages before the invention of printing andthe p r inting pres s, all books, all manual scripts were hand-made. and thematerial typically used for the pages

48、 was parchment, which is animal skinthat stretched and dried under tension, so it bec o me s really fat and canbe written on . during the 1400s, when printing was being developed,paper became the predominant material for books in europe, but priorto t hat, it was parchment . parchment is durable, mu

49、ch more so thanpaper, and it could be reus ed which came in handy since it was a costlymaterial and in short supply. so it wasn t uncommon for the scribes ormonks who produce the manual scripts . ah, remember before printingbooks were made mainly in monasteries . well, the scribes often recycledthe

50、parchment that d been used for earlier manual scripts. they simplyerased the ink off the parchment and wrote something new in its placea manual script page that was written on, erased and then used again iscalled a palimpsest . palimpsests were created, well, w e kn ow about twomethods that were use

51、d for removing ink from parchment. in the latemiddle ages, it was customary to scrape away the surface of theparchment with an abrasive, which completely wiped out any writingthat was there. but earlier in the middle ages, the original ink wasusually removed by washing the used parchment with milk.

52、thatremoved the ink. but with the passing of time, the original writing mightreappear. in fact , it might rea pp ear to the extent that scholars couldmake out an even deci p her , the original text. perhaps, the most famousexample is the archimedes palimpsest.archimedes li v e d in g re ece around 2

53、00 bce, and as you probably know,hes considered one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived, eventhough , many of his writings had been lost , includi ng what many nowthink to be his most important work called the method . but in 1998, abook of prayers from the middle ages sold in an art aucti

54、on for a lot ofmoney, more money than anyone would pay for a damaged book fromthe 12th century. beautiful or not, why? it had been discovered that thebook was a palimpsest, and beneath the surface writing on the manualscript laid, guess what? mathematical theorems and diagrams fromarchimedesarchimed

55、es writings were originally done on papyrus scrolls. then in the10 th century, a scribe made a copy on parchment of some of his texts anddiagrams including, as it turns out, the method . this was extremelyfortunate, since later on, the original papyrus scrolls disappeared. about200 years later in th

56、e 12 th century, this parchment manual script becamea 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 knewit existed. it wasnt until 1906 that a scho

57、lar came across the prayer bookin a library and realized it was a palimpsest, and that the underlying layerof texts could only have come from archimedes. that was when his workthe method was discovered for the first time .um. the palimpsest then went through some more tough times, buteventually it ended up in an art auction where was bought and thendonated to an art museum in balti