PART A Micro-Listening
1. W: How do you like talking with your roommate Paul?
M: Oh, he always beats around the bush.
Q : What do we know about Paul?
2. W: What a mess! The guests will be here soon.
M: Take it easy. I assure you the house will be spotless in a minute.
Q : What does the man mean?
3. W: I've got to leave now, Bob. When shall we meet next week?
M: Let's make it next Monday. That's the day after Mother's Day.
Q : What does the man suggest?
4. W: How's your new job?
M: It's quite all right but it'll take me some time to learn the ropes.
Q: What does the man say about his new job?
5. M: I've lost the disc John lent me last weekend.
W: If he finds out, he will really lose his temper.
Q : How will John react when he learns about what the man did?
6. W: Professor Davis caught some students cheating on the final exam and failed them.
M: Serve them right.
Q : How does the man react to the woman's statement?
7. M: Do you think we should put an ad in the newspaper to sell our car?
W: By all means.
Q : What does the woman mean?
8. W: Everybody should do his bit for the dinner party. Would you make the salad?
M: Anything but that.
Q: What does the man mean?
9. W: How did Rosa do on her English exam?
M: She passed with flying colors.
Q : What does the man say about Rosa?
10. M: Will Professor Benson ask you to make up your physics exam?
W: I don't know. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Q : What is the woman planning to do?
PART B Macro-Listening
Passage I
Alexander Bell
Tapescript
The famous inventor Alexander Bell was born in 1847 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He attended the Edinburgh High School and then went on to university: first in Edinburgh and then in London. In 1870 he emigrated to Canada. Three years later, he moved to Boston, where he started a school of vocal physiology for teachers of the deaf. Teaching the deaf to communicate was a problem he had always been interested in. In the same year, he became professor of vocal physiology at Boston University.
From his early experience with the study of sound, he became interested in the telegraph, a device which sends sounds by an electric current. During one experiment with his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, he was adjusting the tone of the telegraph's steel spring when he heard other sounds coming through the spring. This discovery showed him that the current could transmit the vibrations of a person's voice. In 1876 he invented the telephone.
On April 3, 1877, he completed the first telephone conversation between Boston and New York, a distance of more than two hundred miles.
Now people almost everywhere in the world can speak to each other by telephone. A special telephone can also transmit a picture of the speaker as well as the voice. This device enables deaf persons to use the telephone. By lip reading, or watching the movements of the speaker's lips, a deaf person can actually see what the person at the other end of the line is saying.
Passage 2
Abraham Lincoln
Tapescript
Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky on February 12, 1809. When he was a small boy, his family moved to Indiana. Here, his mother taught him to read and write. Lincoln had very little formal education, but he became one of the best-educated men of the Great West.
When Lincoln was a young man, his family moved again to the new state of Illinois. Lincoln had to earn a living at an early age, but in his leisure time he studied law. He soon became one of the best-known lawyers in the state capital of Illinois. It was here that Lincoln became famous for his debates with Stephen Douglas on the subject of slavery.
In 1860, Lincoln was elected President of the United States. He was the candidate of the Republican Party. This party opposed the creation of new slave states. Soon after his election, some of the Southern states withdrew from the Union and set up the Confederate States of America. This action brought on the terrible Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865.
On January 1, 1863, during the war, Lincoln issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation. In this document, Lincoln proclaimed that all the slaves in the Southern states were to be free from that day on. In 1865, after the war ended, the Thirteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution of the United States. This amendment put an end to slavery everywhere in the United States.
Early in 1865, the Civil War came to an end with the defeat of the South by the North. Only a few days after the end of the war, Lincoln was shot by an actor named John Wilkes Booth. The President died on April 14, 1865. In his death, the world lost one of the greatest men of all time. |