新标准大学英语-视听说教程第一册Listening-in听力原文

新标准大学英语-视听说教程第一册Listening-in听力原文

Unit 1 Starting out Listening in Passage 1

Interviewer Can you tell me something about the Ivy League? You're a professor at Harvard, is that right? Professor That's right, yes.

Interviewer Tell me how many universities are there? How many institutions?

Professor In total there are eight institutions: There's Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell,

Dartmouth, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Interviewer Ah, OK. And what's the sporting ... I believe there's some link with sports.

Professor There certainly is, yes. Originally the Ivy League referred to the sports teams from the

universities which competed against each other, especially in football, basketball and ice hockey. Now sometimes these universities, institutions, chose their students on the basis of their skills at these particular sports. But in the last 50 years, Ivy League schools have accepted a wider range of students because it wasn't possible to be both world-famous for research and also top class in sport.

Interviewer And what about their academic importance? I gather they're academically very, very

important, they're very well-known.

Professor Absolutely at the top. They're near or at the top of the USA colleges and university rankings. And

they're almost always in the top one per cent of the world's academic institutions for financial resources. Interviewer And what does it mean socially to go to an Ivy League university?

Professor Certainly if you've been to one of these institutions, you are presumed or assumed to be at the top

end of the scale. The Ivy League institutions have a reputation for social elitism, many of the students are rich, intellectual, white Anglo-Saxon, protestants. Not all of them of course, but quite a lot of them. Interviewer And do you know ... why's it called the Ivy League, what's the origin of the name?

Professor There are a number of stories, derivations, but possibly it's based on four universities, and IV, the

letters IV, that's the Roman numeral for four. Another more likely story is that ivy plants, which are symbolic of the age of the universities, you know, would be grown at the walls of these universities, these institutions, they cover the walls of the buildings. The term was created by a sports journalist, I think in the 1930s.

Interviewer Right, OK. And which is the oldest university?

Professor The oldest goes back to the 17th century, that's Harvard which was founded in 1636. And the

youngest of the institutions is Cornell which was founded in 1865. Interviewer And which has the largest number of undergraduates?

Professor Cornell has the largest number, about 13,000, 13,500 undergraduates. The institution with the

smallest number is Dartmouth College with a little over 4,000. Interviewer And what about the acceptance rate? Is it hard to get into? Professor That ranges from about seven per cent to 20 per cent. Interviewer And any famous alumni? Famous old boys?

Professor Hundreds! Hundreds of them. But I suppose worldwide, the two that would be definitely known

all over the world would certainly be George Bush who went to Yale, and John F Kennedy, President Kennedy, who was at Harvard. Interviewer Thank you. Passage2

Andy Did you see the film on television last night?

Jane No, I was out. What was it?

Andy A Beautiful Mind. It's about John Forbes Nash, the mathematician who won the Nobel Prize.

Jane I've heard about that film, yes. He's played by Russell Crowe, isn't he? I like Russell Crowe, he's great. Andy That's the one, yes. Jane What's it about?

Andy Well, the story begins in the early years of Nash's life at Princeton University as a graduate student. Jane That's one of the Ivy League schools, isn't it?

Andy Yes, it's all set in New England, lovely old buildings, beautiful autumn colours. It's lovely to look at.

Anyway, Nash meets his roommate Charles, a literature student, who soon becomes his best friend. Nash admits to Charles that he is better with numbers than people, and the main thing he's looking for is a truly original idea for his thesis paper. Jane So he's not interested in having fun?

Andy Well, yes, but he's not very good with people or successful with women, that's all. But, you know, it's

one of these bad experiences with people which ultimately inspires his brilliant work in mathematics. Jane No good at relationships, so he becomes a genius at maths?

Andy That's about right, yes. So when he finishes his studies at Princeton, he accepts a job at Massachusetts

Institute of Technology. Five years later, he meets Alicia, a student who he falls in love with and eventually marries.

Jane Ah! At last, the love interest!

Andy Yes, but wait a moment. Nash believes that he's been asked to work by William Parcher for the US

Department of Defense on breaking Soviet codes. At one point he's chased by the Russians, and it's after this that he becomes mentally ill.

Jane I think I've seen this in the trailer to the film.

Andy So when he's put in a psychiatric hospital, he thinks the Soviets have captured him. He's given this

painful treatment which affects his relationship with his wife. And his intellectual skills. So he stops taking the medicine.

Jane It sounds quite hard to watch.

Andy Well, it is, but it's well acted and directed, and so, you know, there's a-bit of distance between the

audience and what's happening on film. Jane So what happens next?

Andy Well, then his illness returns, so he and his wife decide to try and live with it. It all gets a bit

complicated, because we're no longer sure if Charles, you know, his old friend, or even Parcher were real, or if they were just people that existed only in Nash's mind. Jane That sounds awful. He must have been so ill,

Andy Actually, I'm kind of giving away the twist in the story. Anyway, later in his life, while he's using the

library at Princeton again, he asks his rival Martin Hansen if he can start teaching again. And so the story ends when he goes on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Jane Well, it sounds like a great film. Andy Yes, you should see it sometime.

Unit 3 Learning to think Listening in Passage 1

Interviewer With us today is Martin Downes, a carpenter, who's 51. A year ago, Martin had a stroke. But

he's been lucky enough to make a full recovery from it. Can you tell us how it all began, Martin? Martin I'm very happy to - not that I remember much at all. I was at a customer's house, building a

cupboard, and the next thing I knew, I woke up in hospital with people in white coats bending over me. Interviewer It must have been very frightening.

Martin It was. But what was really frightening was that I couldn't speak. I couldn't say a word. And I

couldn't understand much that people said to me. Interviewer How awful!

Martin Yeah! I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't had my family. But they were there

for me, they really were. I had something called aphasia, where the part of your brain gets damaged that affects your speech and language. But they started treatment for the condition almost immediately. This speech and language therapist came to see me every day for 12 weeks. They made me do all these exercises.

Interviewer What kind of exercises?

Martin I had to match words and pictures and say their names. You see, I'd also forgotten the names of a lot

of things. She had this thing called a word board and I could point to words and phrases on it that I wanted to say. I had to repeat words up to 20 times - boy, it was hard, so hard. Interviewer Could you say anything to begin with?

Martin I could say three words. \\and \That was all. And there were a lot of words I

couldn't understand -1 had to learn their meanings all over again. Interviewer It must have been very frustrating.

Martin It was, but I was determined to get better. I was in hospital for three and a half months. When I got

home I got a special computer programme that I worked with every day. And slowly my language came back to me. It was a struggle, a big struggle. I had to learn to read and write again too.

Interviewer Why do you think that you were able to recover completely? It's not that common, is it? Martin I was lucky. I was given the right drug at the right time. And I had 12 weeks of therapy, five days a

week. That's very important, apparently.

Interviewer And now that you're better how do you feel about your life? Martin What can I say? I'm just grateful to have my life back.

Passage 2

Interviewer In 1907 an Italian educator called Maria Montessori opened a school in Rome that taught

young children using methods that were very different from traditional teaching. Today, the Montessori method, as it's known, is used in nursery schools in countries such as America, Canada, Britain and Germany. Recent research shows that children educated at a Montessori nursery do better later on at school than other children in all subjects. We asked two Montessori teachers, Claudia Rosella and Sarah Harrington, to explain what makes their nursery school different. Sarah...

Sarah I think the first thing to say is that a Montessori classroom is very quiet, very clean. Everything stays

in the same place. So the children are calm and quiet as a result. Interviewer So they're not encouraged to be noisy. Sarah No, definitely not... Interviewer Claudia?

Claudia Yes, the classroom's very important. Another important principle is that children direct their own

learning. They choose what they want to do.

Interviewer So the teacher doesn't tell the child what to do?