旧托福听力PartC原文(95-04).doc

旧托福听力Part C2004年8月演讲1：Id like to share with you today my experience with a new approach to building a house. Its called Envelop Building. Essentially, what it means is that as you are building a house, you try to leave the landscape feature on the land, especially the vegetation in the original condition. So what you are not doing is the usual practice of land scraping. By which I mean literally scraping or cleaning the land of any and all the original plants. Why is the approach called Envelop Building? Because instead of clearing everything away, you let your original landscape elements envelop or surround your house. Let the vegetation physical features such as hills and slopes or interesting rock formations, constituted a significant part of the character of the building sight. The design of the house should take these features of the property into account. Actually integrating your original wild landscape with a house is not that new. The famous American architect Wright was doing it about 65 years ago. So we are in good company. Envelop Building is not as easy as it sounds though. Its not just that you build your house and leave the land alone. By building, you are already damaging the original landscape. But as architects, we should try to work with environment, not against it. A creative architect can find ways to incorporate natural landscape into the overall design. For example, why used the massive boulders on the side of one of the most famous houses as part of the house foundation?演讲2：Today we are going to talk about copyrighting works of art. A copyright is a proof of authorship. It protects artists against someone else using their work without their permission. Its important to remember that United States Copyright Law protects artistic expressions such as paintings, but does not protect any ideas, concept, procedure or technique. In all the United States Copyright Law, Artists needed to take several steps to obtain copyright protection. The law as changed in 1978 and again 1989. For artists the current law means everything they create is automatically and immediately copyrighted. They dont have to file any documents and under the protection of the Copyright Law, any recreation of their original work such as prints are also covered by the artists copyright. Further more, any changes artists made to their original works are covered. The Law also makes it clear that when someone buys the work of art, they are not allowed to destroy or change that work of art. Artists keep the copyright even after selling the work of art. The purchaser may buy the physical work, but the right to make prints or copies is still the artists and buyers does not automatically have any right to make and sell prints or copies of work. Although works are automatically copyrighted, artists are encouraged to register their work with United States Copyright Office. Registering art provides additional legal protection and also gives the people around the world the ability to approach the honors about licensing and purchasing right.演讲3：Today lets talk about synesthesia, thats a brain condition in which a persons senseare combined in a unusual ways. For example, a person with synesthesia may taste sounds. To them, a musical note may taste like a pickle. Many people who have synesthesia experience intense colors when they hear specific words. For example, they might see a flash of pink every time they hear the word “jump”. For a long time, many scientists were unconvinced that synesthesia really exists. So in the 1990s an experiment was done to find our for sure. Two groups were studied. One was a group of people who claim to experience colors when they heard certain words. The other was a controlled group, people who experience nothing out of the ordinary when hearing words. Each group was asked to describe the colors they thought of when they heard a list of spoken words. When the test was repeated, the difference between the two groups was startling. After just a week, the controlled group gave the same answers only a third of the time. But even a year and a half later, the synesthetic group gave the same answers 92% of the time. Clearly, this is not just a matter of memory. Scientists are still not sure just why synesthesia happens. But certain drugs are reportedly able to produce it artificially. So we all probably have brains with connections that could synesthesia. Its just the connections normally we used in that way.2004年5月演讲1：Today lets consider the neutrino and the resolves of some experiments down in the 1995 at the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico, which bear on the neutrino. These resolves suggest that this little particle does indeed have mass that tiny bet to be sure but measurable by the very sensitive instruments of that lab. The neutrinos origin has always been an interesting case, though a case not unusual in the history of physics. As you know, ordinarily scientific observation precedes scientific theory. Ocean tides were observed, ocean tides were explained; gravity is observed, gravity is explained. However, lets consider what happened in the neutrinos case. When the neutrino was proposed over sixty years ago, it was a convenient fiction. Scientists had not observed such a particle nor even as a fact. So what let them to conceive of this imaginary object? They had been writing equations about neutron decay in which the energy amounts on each side of their equations were unequal. In order to keep this energy amounts the same on both sides of the equations, they added little particle named neutrino and gave it precisely enough energy to balance the equations and the loan be hold years later. About thirty-five years ago real neutrinos were found. Now we have the more recent developments. Originally, the neutrino was thought not to have any mass at all. But Los Alamos experiments seem to disprove this premise. They indicated that neutrinos do have massabout one-millionth the mass of electron.演讲2：The forests of New England constituted both are resource and barrier for the first British settlers who reach these shores. In addition to the maples, firs, oaks and birches were white pines whose scientific name is Pinus strobus. These white pines were straight and tall, perfect for use as masts on the sailing ships of the time. Britain had used up its supply of mast trees, so is eager for this product of its young colony. By the first load of masts reached Britain in 1634 and Britain was marveled the size of the trees, which had diameters of up to 4 feet at the wide end. For every yard of mast height, the body end needed to be one inch in diameter. In1705, Britain passed a law stating that all white pines over 24 inches at the body end were reserved for the use of kings navy. Such trees were marked by blazing the kings arrow symbol on the tree with three cuts of the hatchet. These trees were selected by the surveyor general, whose work often met with resistances of colonists.演讲3：Now the Australia jumping spider as you can image got its name for its ability to leap. But it can swim too. Whats most interesting though is its ability to use try and error tactics when solving problems. Now the jumping spider attacks and eats other spiders. Itll sit at the edge of another spiders web and attract the spider by tapping out different signals to mimic the struggles of a trapped insect and itll keep changing the signals till successfully lured its prey out. Well, to see if the jumping spider could apply the same problem solving technique, try and error to unfamiliar situations, scientists conducted an experiment. They field a trap full of water and then put some sand in the middle, like an island. In between the island and the edge of the trap, they put a rock. When they put the spider on the island, some tried jumping to the rock, and some tried swimming. All the spiders that successfully reached the rock either by jumping or by swimming use the same method to make it from the rock to the edge of the tree. If the spider failed to reach the rock, it was placed back on the island, but the next time they try to leave, spiders did opposite of whatever didnt work the first time, leaping if it had swum, or swimming if it had leaped. So we see the spiders using the same try and error in crossing the water as they used in hunting.04年1月：演讲1：Im going to pass this piece of amber around so you can see this spider trapped inside it. Its a good example of amber-inclusion, one of the inclusions that scientists are interested in these days. This particular piece is estimated to be about 20 million years old. Please be extremely careful not to drop it. Amber shatters as easily as glass. One thing I really like about amber is its beautiful golden color.Now, how does the spider get in there? Amber is really fossilized tree resin. Lots of chunks of amber contain insects like this one or animal parts like feathers or even plants. Here is how it happens. The resin oozes out of the tree and the spider or leaf gets incased in it. Over millions and millions of years, the resin hardens and fossilizes into the semiprecious stone you see here.Ambers can be found in many different places around the world. But the oldest deposits are right here in the United States, in Appalachian. Its found in several other countries, too, though right now scientists are most interested in amber coming from the Domincian Republic. Because it has a great any inclusions, something like one insect inclusion for every one hundred pieces. One possible explanation for this it that the climate is tropical and a greater variety of number of insects thrive in tropics than in other places. Whats really interesting is the scientists are now able to recover DNA from these fossils and study the genetic material for important clues to revolution.演讲2：Now weve been talking about the revolutionary period in the United States history when the colonies wanted to separate from England. Id like to mention one point about the very famous episode from that period, a point I think is pretty relevant even today. Im sure you remember, from when you are children, the story of Paul Reveres famous horseback ride to the Massachusetts countryside. In that version, he single-headily alerted the people that “the British were coming”. We have this image of us solitary rider galloping along in the dark from one farm house to another. And of course the story emphasized the courage of one man, made him a hero in our history books, right? But, that rather romantic version of the story is not what actually happened that night. In fact, that version misses the most important point entirely. Paul Revere was only one of the many riders helping deliver the message that night. Just one part of a pre-arrange plan, that was thought out well in advance in preparation for just such an emergency. I dont mean to diminish Reveres role though. He was actually an important organizer and promoter of this group effort for freedom. His mid-night riders didnt just go knocking on farm house doors. They also awaken the institutions of New England. They went from town to town and engage the town leaders, the military commanders and volunteer groups, even church leaders, people who would then continue to spread the word. My point is that Paul Revere and his political party understood, probably more clearly than later generations ever have, that political institutions are there as a kind of medium for the will of people and also to both build on and support individual action. They knew the success requires careful planning and organization. The way they went about the work that night made a big difference in the history of this country.演讲3：Let me warn you against a mistake that historians of science often make. They sometimes assume that people in the past use the same concepts as we do. There is a wonderful example that made news in the history of mathematics some while ago. It concerns an ancient Mesopotamian tablet that has some calculations on it using square numbers. The calculations look an awful lot like the calculations of the length of the sides of triangle. So thats what many historians assume they were. But using square numbers to do this is a very sophisticated technique. If the Mesopotamians knew how to do it, as the historians started thinking that they did. Well, then their math was incredibly advanced. Well, it turns out the idea of Mesopotamians use square numbers to calculate the length of triangles sides is probably wrong. Why? Because we discovered that Mesopotamians didnt know how to measure angles, which is a crucial element in the whole process of triangle calculations. Apparently the Mesopotamians had a number of other uses for square numbers. These other uses were important but they were not used with triangles. And so these tablets in all likelihood were practice sheets, if you like, for doing simpler math exercises with square numbers. In all likelihood, it was the ancient Greeks who first calculate the length of triangles sides using square numbers. And this was hundreds of years after the Mesopotamians.03年10月：演讲1：Today, we are going to talk about a special way some plants respond to being invaded by pests. These plants react by emitting a chemical signal, which acts like a call for help. Lets take corn plants for example. Sometimes, caterpillars chew on the corn leaves. When the caterpillar saliva mixes with the chew portion of a leaf, the plant releases a chemical scream that attracts wasps. The wasps respond to the signal by flying to the chewed-on leaf, and laying their eggs in the caterpillars. The caterpillars die in the next few days as the wasp offspring nourish themselves by feeding off them. Thus the corn plant prevents all its leaves from being eaten by the caterpillars. This chemical scream is specific. Its only released after the plant has detected the caterpillar saliva. A plant that is cut by any other means does not give off the same signal, nor doesnt undamaged plant. This also explains how a wasp can find a caterpillar in a huge field of corn. Soybeans, cotton and probably many other plants use a similar type of defense against pests. By enhancing this natural response in plants, researchers might reduce, or some day even eliminate, the need for chemical pesticide, which can cause ecological damage. For example, scientists might breed plants for this screaming trait, or they might transplant specific genes to increase the release of chemical signals.演讲2：Today, we are going to continue our discussion of Buddhism. In our last class, we talked about how its practiced. Today, Id like to talk a little about early Buddhism, which we really dont know much about. Well, what is known is that the teachings of Buddhism were memorized, and passed on orally for centuries by its followers. Recently, there was an important discovery of Buddhist manuscripts that are believed to be the oldest ever found. They may be 2,100 years old. And there maybe as many as 20 of them. Its expected that we will be able to learn from them about the spread of Buddhism from present day India into China, and throughout Asia. But the scrolls themselves have presented challenge too. They were very fragile, found rolled up in clay pots. Before they even could be looked at, they need to be dampened over night in fact, and then carefully flattened with tweezers. And its not that anybody could just sit down and read them. The scrolls were written in a language that is really rare today. Only a few people are proficient at it. Considering these challenges, its easy to understand why its taken scholars so long to examine the scrolls.演讲3：About 200 years ago, the United States economy was growing quickly, mainly because a booming trade in grain and cotton. This trade in grain and cotton went on near areas near or at the coast, or near navigable rivers. It took place there because it was so expensive to transport goods over the roads that existed. They were muddy, narrow, and hard to travel on. At that time, dont forget there was only one continuous road that existed in the US, and it was made up of north to south local country roads, linked together to make one long road. Within a short time, the first east-to-west roads were built. They were called turnpikes. Private companies built these roads, and collected fees from all vehicles that traveled on them. Eventually, a network of dirt, gravel or plank roadways connected some major cities and towns. But even these turnpike roads were still very slow, and traveling on them was too costly for farmers. They wouldve spent more money to move their crops than they got by selling them. So, we see that even with some major improvement in roadways, farmers still had to rely on rivers to move their crops to market.03年8月：演讲1：In my opinion, Frank Lloyd Wright was the greatest American architect of the 20th century. People who know his designs well point out that his roofs often leaked, his ceilings were too low, and his houses were uncomfortable. In my presentation, however, Ill be focusing on the virtues of his designs. For what you see, it would be hard todispute that he manipulated space extremely well, some of his smallest houses look gigantic,and he had great respect for the materials he used and also a tremendous skill for placing his buildings in harmony with nature.Wrightscareer began when he was young. He was just a teenager when he helped build the chapel on his familys property in Wisconsin. And from there, he got hired as a draftsman by the project architect. So it was a very long career. He did at 91, while his final major work, the Guggenheim Museum, was still being built.Today, well cover what we consider to be the two great periods of his career, Wrights works before the Tokyo Imper