TPO 15 听力文本Megan.docx

1、TPO 15 听力文本MeganTPO 15听力文本TPO 15 ScriptSection 1Conversation1Narrator:Listen to a conversation between a Student and the faculty Advisor of the campus newspaper.StudentHi! I talked to someone on the phone a couple of weeks ago, Anna, I think it was?AdvisorIm Anna, the faculty advisor.StudentOh, grea

2、t! Im Peter Murphy. You probably dont r e member me, but AdvisorNo! No! I remember you. Youre interested in working for the paper.StudentYeah, as a reporter.AdvisorThats right. Youre taking a journalism class and youve done some reporting before in high school, right?StudentWow, you have a good memo

3、ry.AdvisorWell we havent had many students applying lately so so anyway, you still want to do some reporting for us?StudentYeah, if you have room for me on the staff.AdvisorWell we always need more reporters, but you know, we dont pay anything, right?StudentYeah, I know, but I huh. . Id like the exp

4、erience. It would look good on my resume .AdvisorAbsolutely! Lets see. I think I told you that we ask prospective reporters to turn in some outlines for possible articles.StudentYeah, I sent them in about a week ago, but I havent heard anything back yet, so, so I thought Id stop by and see, but I gu

5、ess you havent looked at them yet.AdvisorOh, Max, the news editor. He looks a t all the submissions. StudentOh, so he hasnt made any decision about me yet?AdvisorWell I just got here a few minutes ago. havent been in for a couple of days. Just give me a second to check my e-mail. Uh here is a messag

6、e from Max. Lets see. Well it seems youve really impressed him. He says it would be wonderful if you could join our staff.StudentOh, great! When can I start?AdvisorWell, you turned in an outline on something to do with the physics department?StudentYeah, theyre trying to come up with ways to get mor

7、e Students to take their introductory courses.AdvisorRight, well, apparently, nobody else is covering that story, so he wants you to follow up on it.StudentOK. Uh what the other outline I sent in, about the proposed increase in tuition fees?AdvisorOh, it looks like weve got that coveredStudentSo I a

8、m starting with an article about the physics department. I guess Id better get to work. Do you have any advice on how I should cover the story?AdvisorWell, Max will want to talk to you but I am sure he will tell you to find out things like why the physics departments worried about enrollment. Has th

9、e number of Students been getting smaller in recent years? By how much? What kinds of plans are they considering to address this problem?StudentRight, some of those issues are already in what I proposed.AdvisorAnd youll want to do some interviews, you know, what do the Professors think of the plans,

10、 what do the Students think you get the idea but StudentBut wait till I talk to Max before proceeding.AdvisorRight, hell cover everything you need to know to be a reporter for us. Can you come back this afternoon? He will be here until 5 oclock.Lecture 1Narrator:Listen to part of a lecture in a psyc

11、hology class.ProfessorFor decades, psychologists have been looking at our ability to perform tasks while other things are going on, how we are able to keep from being distracted and what the conditions for good concentration are. As long ago as 1982, researchers came up with something called the CFQ

12、 - the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. This questionnaire asks people to rate themselves according to how often they get distracted in different situations, like hum . forgetting to save a computer file because they had something else on their mind or missing a speed limit sign on the road. John?J

13、ohnIve lost my share of computer files, but not because I m easily distracted. I just forget to save them.ProfessorAnd thats part of the problem with the CFQ. It doesnt take other factors into account enough, like forgetfulness. Plus you really cant say you are getting objective scientific results f

14、rom a subjective questionnaire where people report on themselves. So its no surprise that someone attempted to design an objective way to measure distraction. Its asimple computer game designed by a psychologist named, Nilli Lavie. In Lavies game, people watch as the letters N and X appear and disap

15、pear in a certain area on the computer screen. Every time they see an N, they press one key, and every time they see an X they press another, except other letters also start appearing in the surrounding area of the screen with increasing frequency which creates a distraction and makes the task more

16、difficult. Lavie observed that peoples reaction time slowed as these distractions increased.StudentWell thats not too surprising, isnt it?ProfessorNo, its not. Its the next part of the experiment that was surprising. When the difficulty really increased, when the screen filled up with letters, peopl

17、e got better at spotting the Xs and Ns. What (why) do you think that happened?JohnWell, maybe when we are really concentrating, we just dont perceive irrelevant information. Maybe we just dont take it in, you know?ProfessorYes, and thats one of the hypotheses that was proposed, that the brain simply

18、 doesnt admit the unimportant information. The second hypothesis is that, yes, we do perceive everything, but the brain categorizes the information, and whatever is not relevant to what we are concentrating on gets treated as low priority. So Lavie did another experiment, designed to look at the abi

19、lity to concentrate better in the face of increased difficulty. This time she used brain scanning equipment to monitor activity in a certain part of the brain, the area called V5, which is part of the visual cortex, the part of our brains that processes visual stimuli. V5 is the area of the visual c

20、ortex thats responsible for the sensation of movement. Once again, Lavie gave people a computer-based task to do. They have to distinguish between words in upper and lower-case letters or even harder, they had to count the number of syllables in different words. This time the distraction was a movin

21、g star field in the background, you know, where H looks like you are moving through space, passing stars. Normally area of V5 would be stimulated as those moving stars are perceived and sure enough, Lavie found that during the task area of V5 was active, so people were aware of the moving star field

22、. That means people were not blocking out the distraction.StudentSo doesnt that mean that the first hypothesis you mentioned was wrong, the one that says we dont even perceive irrelevant information when we are concentrating?ProfessorYes thats right, up to a point, but thats not all. Lavie also disc

23、overed that as she made the task more difficult, V5 became less active, so that means that now people werent really noticing the star field at all. That was quite a surprise and it approved that the second hypothesis that we do perceive everything all the time but the brain categorizes distractions

24、differently, well, that wasnt true either. Lavie thinks the solution lies in the brains ability to accept or ignore visual information. She thinks its capacity is limited. Its like a highway. When there are too many cars, traffic is stopped. No one can get on. So when the brain is loaded to capacity

25、, no new distractions can be perceived. Now that may be the correct conclusion for visual distractions, but more research is needed to tell us how the brain deals with, say, the distractions of solving a math problem when we are hungry or when someone is singing in the next room.Lecture 2Narrator:Li

26、sten to part of a lecture in a geology class.ProfessorAs geologists, we examine layers of sediment on the Earths surface to approximate the dates of past geologic time periods. Ah sediment as you know is material like sand , gravel, fossil fragments that is transported by natural processes like wind

27、 , water flow or the movement of glaciers . So sediment is transported and then deposited and it forms layers on the Earths surface over time. We examine these layers to learn about different geologic time periods including when they began and ended. For example, from about 1.8 million years ago to

28、around 11 thousand years ago was the Pleistocene epic. The Pleistocene epic was an ice age. During this epic, sediment was made by the kind of erosion and weathering that happens when the climate is colder, and part of those sediments are fossils of plants and animals that lived at that time. The Ho

29、locene epic followed the Pleistocene epic when the Earths climate warmed up around 11 thousand years ago. The Holocene epic is characterized by different sediments, ones that form when the climate is warmer. Because the climate changed, the types of plants and animals changed also. Holocene sediment

30、s contain remnants of more recent plants and animals, so its pretty easy to differentiate geologically between these two epics. Now there is growing evidence that the presence of humans has altered the earth so much that a new epic of geologic history has began(begun) the Anthropocene epic, a new hu

31、man-influenced epic. This idea that weve entered a new Anthro-pocene epic was first proposed in 2002. The idea is that around the year 1800 CE the human population became large enough, around a billion people, that its activities started altering the environment. This was also the time of the indust

32、rial revolution, which brought a tremendous increase in the use of fossil fuels such coal. The exploitation of fossil fuels has brought planet wide developments: industrialization, construction, uh, mass transport. And these developments have caused major changes like additional erosion of the Earths surface and deforestation. Also, things like the damming of rivers, has caused increased sediment production, not to mention the addition of mo