托福OG听力原文

Track 5 A Psychology lecture Track 1 M: Excuse me, Prof. Thomson. I know your office hours are tomorrow, but I was wondering if you have a few minutes free now to discuss something. W: Sure, John. What do you want to talk about? M: Well, I have some quick questions about how to write about the research project that I do this semester about Climate Variations. W: Oh, yes. You were looking for Variations in Climate in the G city area, right? How far along have you been gotten? M: I’ve gotten my data, so I’m starting to summarize it now, preparing graph and stuff. But I’m just…I’m looking at it and I’m afraid that is not enough, but I’m not sure what else to put into the report. W: I hear the same thing from every student. You know, you have to remember now that you are the expert on what you have done. So think about what you need to include if you’re going to explain your research project to someone with general or casual knowledge about the subject like your parents. That’s usually my rule____ Would my parents understand this. M: Uhh, I get it. W: I hope you can recognize by my thing how much you do know about the subject. M: Right, I understand. I was wondering if I should also include the notes from the research journals you suggest I keep. W: Yes, definitely. You should use them to indicate what your evolution and thought was through time. So just set up, you know, what was the purpose of what you were doing. To try to understand the climate variability of this area. What you did and what your approach was. M: Ok. So, for example, I study meteorological records, I look at climate charts, I use different methods for analyzing the data like certain statistic tests, and then I discuss the results. Is that what you mean? W: Yes, that’s right. You should include all of that. The statistical tests are specially important, and also be sure you include good reference section where all your published and unpublished data came from. Could you have a lot of unpublished climate data? M: Um. Something just came out of my mind and went out the other side W: It happens to me a lot. So, I have come up with a pretty good memory management tool. I carry a little pad with me over time and jot down questions and ideas that I don’t want to forget. For example, I went to the doctor with my daughter and her baby son last week, and we know we wouldn’t remember everything we want to ask the doctor, so we actually made at least five things we want answers to. M: Notepad is a good idea. Since I’m so busy now, at the end of this semester I’m getting pretty forgetful these days. How can I just remember what I’m going to say before W: Good, I was hoping you come up with it. M: Yes. It ends up that I have data more than just in the G city area, so I also include some regional data in the report. With everything else, it should be a pretty good indicate of climate of this part of state. W: Sounds good. I’ll be happy to look over a draft version before you hand the final copy if you wish. M: Great. I plan to get you the draft of paper by next Friday. Thanks very much. Well, see you. W: Ok. Track 3 A Philosophy Class Ok, another ancient Greek philosopher we need to discuss is Aristotle---Aristotle’s Ethical Theory. What Aristotle’s Ethical Theory is all about is this: he’s trying to show you how to be happy and what true happiness is. Now, why is he interested in human happiness? It’s not just because it’s something that all people want or aim for. It’s more than that. But to get there, we need to first make a very important distinction. Let me introduce a couple of technical terms: extrinsic value and intrinsic value. To understand Aristotle’s interest in happiness, you need to understand this distinction. Something we aim for and value not for themselves but for what they bring about in addition to themselves. If I value something as a means to something else, then it has and we will call extrinsic value. Other things we desire and hope to be valuable for themselves alone. If we value something not as a means to something else, but for its own sake, let’s say that it has intrinsic value. Exercise, there may be some people who value exercise for itself, but I don’t. I value exercise because if I exercise I tend to stay healthier than I would if I didn’t. So I desire to engage in an exercise and I value exercise extrinsically not for its own sake but as a means to something beyond it---it brings me good health. Health, why do I value good health? Well, here it gets a little more complicate for me. Health is important for me because I can’t do other things I want to do—play music, teach philosophy if I’m ill. So health is important to me and has value to me as a means to a productive life, but health is also important to me because I just kind of like to be healthy, it feels good. It’s pleasant to be healthy and unpleasant not to be. So to some degree, I value health both for itself and as a means to something else—productivity. It’s got extrinsic and intrinsic value for me. Then there are something that I just value them for themselves. I’m a musician, not a professional musician, and I just play musical instruments for fun. Why do I value playing music? Well, like most amateur musicians, I only play because, well, I just enjoy it, something that’s and ends in itself. Now, something else I value is teaching. Why? Well, it brings a modest income, but I could make more money doing other things. I do it even if they didn’t pay me. I just enjoy teaching. In this sense, it’s intrinsic itself. Teaching is not something that has intrinsic value for all people and that’s true generally. Most things that enjoy and end in themselves vary from person to person. Some people value teaching intrinsically, but others don’t. So how do all those relate to human happiness? Well, Aristotle asks---is there something that all human beings value and value only intrinsically for its own sake and only for its own sake? If you could find such a thing, that would be the universal final good or truly the automatic purpose or goal for all human beings. Aristotle thought the answer was Yes. What is it? Happiness. Everyone would agree, he argues, that happiness is the ultimate end to be valued for itself, and really only for itself. For what other purpose is there being happy, what does it yield. The attainment of happiness becomes the ultimate or highest good for Aristotle. The next question that Aristotle raises is what is happiness. We all want it, we all desire it, we all seek it. It’s the goal we have in our life. But what is it and how do we find it. Well, here he notes with some frustration people disagree. But he does give a couple of criteria or features to keep in mind as we look for what true human happiness is. True happiness should be, as he puts it, complete. Complete… its all we require. Well, true human happiness, if you had that, what else do you need? Nothing. And second, true happiness should be something that I can obtain on my own. I shouldn’t have to rely on other people for it. Many people value fame and seek fame. Fame for them becomes the goal. But according to Aristotle, this won’t work either, because fame depends altogether too much on other people. I can’t get it on my own without help from other people. In the end, Aristotle says that true happiness is the exercise of reason. A life of intellectual contemplation… of thinking. So, let’s see how it comes to that. Track 5 A Psychology lecture Now many people consider John W to be the founder of behaviorism, and like other behaviorists, he believes that psychologists should study only the behaviors they can observe and measure, and they are not interested in mental processes. While a person could describe his thought, no one else can see his behaviorism to verify the accuracy of his report. But one thing you can observe is muscular habits. What W did was to observe muscular habits because he viewed them as manifestation of thinking. One kind of habits that he studied are Laryngeal Habits. W though Laryngeal Habits, you know, from larynx, in other words related to the voice box, he thought those habits were an expression of thinking. He argues that for very young children thinking is really talking out loud to oneself because they talk out loud even if they are not trying to communicate with someone in particular. As individual matures, that overt talking to oneself becomes covert talking to oneself. But thinking still shows up as a Laryngeal Habit. One of bits of evidences that support this is that when people are trying to solve a problem they typically have increasing muscular activity in the throat region. That is if you put electricity on the throat and measure muscle potential and muscle activity, you discover that when people are thinking like if they are diligently trying to solve a problem there is muscular activity in the throat region. So W made the argument that problem solving or thinking can be defined as a set of behaviors or a set of responses, and in this case, the response he observed was the throat activity. That means they called it as Laryngeal Habits. Now, I am thinking what I’m going to say, my muscles in my throat are responding, so thinking can be measured as muscle activity. Now the M theory…Yes? Student: Prof. Blake, did he happen to look at people who sign? I mean deaf people. He did in deed, and to jump ahead, what one finds in deaf individuals who use sign languages when they’ve given problems in various kinds they have muscular changes in their hands when they are trying to solve problems. Muscle changes in hands just like muscular changes going on in the throat region for speaking individuals. So, for W, thinking is like a dead goal with the activity of muscles. A related concept of thinking was developed by William James, called Ideomotor Action. Ideal Mode Action is an action that occurs without our noticing, without our being aware of it. I’ll give you a simple example, if you think locations, there tends to be eye movement that occurs with you thinking about that location. In particular, from where we are sitting, imagine you are asked to think of our university library. Well, if you close your eyes and think of the library, if you are sitting directly facing me, then according to this notion, your eyeballs will move slightly to the left, to your left, because the library is in that general direction. James and others said this is an idea leading to an mode action, and it’s why it is called ideal mode action and an idea leads to a mode activity. If you wish to impress you friends and relatives, you can change this simple process into a magic trick. Ask people to do something such as I’ve just described: think of something on their left, think of something on their right. You get them to think about two things on either side with their eyes closed, and you watch their eyes very carefully, and if you do so, you will discover you can see rather clearly the eye movement, that is you can see the movement of the eyeballs. Now, then you say “think of either one, and I’ll tell you which you are thinking of.” Okay, well, W makes the assumption that muscular activity is equivalent to thinking, but given everything we’ve been talking about here, I want to ask how’s the alternative to the mode theory. This clean that the muscular activity is equivalent to thinking Is there anything else that might account for this changing in muscular activity other than thing that it is thinking, the answer is clearly Yes Is there any way to answer the question definitively, now, I think the answer is No Track 7 An Astronomy Class Ok, let’s get going. Today, I’m going to talk about how the asteroid _____was discovered. I’m going to start by writing some numbers on the board. Here they are. We will start with 0, then3, 6, 12… tell me what I’m doing. W: Multipling by two? Right. I’m doubling the numbers. So, two times 12 is 24. And the next one I’m going to write after 24 would be 48, then 96. We’ll stop there for now. Now I’ll write another row of numbers under that. Tell me what I’m doing. 4, 7, 10… How am I getting the second row? M: Adding 4 to the numbers in the first row. I’m adding 4 to each number in the first row to give you a second row. So the last two would be 52, 100. And now tell me what I am doing. W: putting in a decimal? Yes. I divided all those numbers by ten by putting in a decimal point. Now I’m going to write the names of planets on those numbers. Mercurial, Venus, Earth, Mars. So what do the numbers mean? Do you remember from the reading? M: Is it the distance of the planets from the Sun? Right. In astronomical units, not perfect but tantalizingly close. The value from Mars is off by six or seven percent or so. It’s…but it’s within 10% of the average distance from Mars to the Sun. But I kind of have to skip the one after Mars for now. Then Jupiter’s right there for five point something and then Saturn about ten astronomical units from the Sun. Well, this pattern is known as B.. law. It is really a scientific law not in the sense of predicting gravitation mathematically or something, but it’s attempting a pattern in the spacing of planets. And it was noticed by B.. hundreds of years ago. Well, you can imagine there was some interest in why the 2.8 spot of … was skipped. But there wasn't’ anything obvious there, in the earlier telescopes. Then what happened in the late 1700s, the discovery of ….? W: Another planet the next planet was out—Uranus, after Saturn. Look, Uranus fits in the next spot in the pattern pretty nicely, not perfectly but close. And people got really excited about the validity of the thing and finding the missing objects between Mars and Jupiter. And telescopes, remember, were getting better, so people went to work on finding objects that would be at that missing distance form the Sun . And then in 1801, the object Ceres was discovered. And Ceres was in the right place, the missing spot, but was way too faint to be a planet. It looked like a little star. And because of its starlike appearance, it was called asteroid. Ok? Aster is Greek for star as in astronomy. And so, Ceres was the first and the largest of many objects discovered at that same distance, not just one thing but all the objects found at that distance form the asteroid belt… So, the asteroid … is the most famous success of this Bode’s Law. That’s how the asteroid belt was discovered. Track 9 A Botany Class Hi, everyone. Good to see you all today. Actually I expected the population to be a lot lower today, it typically runs between fifteen and sixteen percent on the day the research papers do. I was hoping to have your exams back today, but the situation was that when I was away from weekend and I was supposed to get here yesterday at five and I expected to fully complete all the exams by midnight or so, which is the time that I usually go to bed, but my flight was delayed and I didn’t get here until one o’clock in the morning. Anyway, I will do my best to have them finished by the next time we meet. Okay, in last class we started talking about useful plant fibers. In particular, we talked about cotton fibers which we say were very useful not only in the textile industry but also in the chemical industry and in the production of many products, such as plastic, paper, explosive, and so on. Today, we’ll continue talking about useful fibers and we’ll begin with fibers that are commonly known as MH. Now, for some strange reasons, many people believe that MH is Hemp plant, but MH is not really Hemp. It is actually a member of the banana family. It even bears little banana shape fruits. The M part of the name makes sense, because MH is produced chiefly in the Philippine Island, and of course the capital city of Philippine is M. Now, as fibers go, MH fiber are very long , and they can easily be several feet of length, are also very strong and very flexible. They have one more characteristic that is very important and that is they are exceptionally resistant to salt water. And this combination of characteristics—long, strong, flexible and resistant to salt water make MH a great material for ropes, especially for ropes that are going to be used in ocean going ships. In fact, by the early 1940s, even the steel cables were available, most ships in the U.S. were not molded with steel cables, they were molded with MH ropes. Now why was that? Well, the main reason was that the steel cables degrade very, very quickly in contact with salt water. If you’ve ever been to San Francisco, you know that the golden bridge is red. And it’s red because they zinc paint on those steel cables. But they started one end of the bridge and they worked to the other end, and by the time they finished, it’s already time to go back and start painting the beginning of the bridge again, because the bridge was built of steel cables, and steel cables can not take salt air unless they are treated repeatedly with zinc-based paint. On the other hand, plant products like MH, you can drag through the ocean for weeks on end. If you want to tie a anchor to it, drop it right to the ocean, that’s no problem, because plant fibers can stand up for months even years and directly contact with salt water. Okay, so how do you take plant fibers that individually you can break with your hands and turn them into a rope that strong enough to move a ship away thousands of tons. Well, what you do is to extract these long fibers from the MH, and then you take several of these fibers and group them into a bundle because by grouping the fibers you greatly increase their breaking strength, that bundle of fibers is much stronger than any other individual fibers that compose it. And then you take the bundle of fibers and twist it a little bit because by twisting it you increase its breaking strength even more. And you take several of these little bundles and you group and twist them into bigger bundles which then you group and twist into even bigger bundles and so on and eventually you end up with a very, very strong rope. Track 11 M: Hi, Hellen, How are you doing? W: Pretty good. Thanks. How are you? M: Okay. W: Did you…um…have a chance to look at my graduate school application, you know, the statement of purpose I wrote. M: Well, yeah. In fact, here it is. I just read it. W: Oh, great. What did you think? M: Basically it’s good. What you might actually do is take some of different points here and actually break them out into separate paragraphs. So one your purpose for applying for graduate study, why do you want to go to graduate school and the area of your specialty, and why do you want to do the area you specify. What you want to do with your degree when you get it? W: Ok. M: Those are…There are pretty clear on those four points they want. W: Right. M: So you may just break them out into, you know, separate paragraphs and expand on each point some. But really what’s critical is that you get let yourself come through. So you get them see you in these statements. Expand some more on what’s happened in your life and what shows your motivation and interest in this area---geology. Let them what really, what captures your imaginations about this area. W: Ok, so make a little more personal? That’s ok? M: That’s fine. They look for that stuff. You don’t want go over all. W: Right. M: But it’s critical that somebody see what your passion is and your personal motivation for doing this. W: Ok M: And that’s gonna to come out here. Let’s see, you might also give a little, since this is your only chance to do it, you might give a little more explanation about your unique undergraduate background. So, you know, I want you through, you know, the music program. What you got from that and why you decided to change. I mean it is kind of unusual to go from music to geology. Right? W: Yeah. I was, I was afraid that, you know, maybe the personal type stuff wouldn’t be what