托福听力_考前小试牛刀（二）

Professor

Ok. The boom in the late 1990s when all those new Internet companies sprung up and then sold for huge amounts of money. Then the bust around 2000…2001 when many of those same Internet companies went out of business. Of course, booms aren’t always followed by busts. We’ve certainly seen times when local economies expanded rapidly for a while and then went back to a normal pace of growth. But, there’s a type of rapid expansion, what might be called the hysterical or irrational boom that pretty much always leads to a bust. See, people often create and intensify a boom when they get carried away by some new industry that seems like it will make them lots of money fast. You’d think that by the 90s, people would have learned from the past. If they did, well, look at tulips.

Student

Tulips? You mean like the flower?

Professor

Exactly. For instance, do you have any idea where tulips are from? Originally I mean.

Student

Well, the Netherlands, right?

Professor

That’s what most people think, but no. They are not native to the Netherlands, or even Europe. Tulips actually hail from an area that Chinese call the Celestial Mountains in Central Asia. A very remote mountainous region. It was Turkish nomads who first discovered tulips and spread them slowly westward. Now, around the 16th century, Europeans were traveling to Istanbul and Turkey as merchants and diplomats. And the Turks often gave the Europeans tulip bulbs as gifts which they would carry home with them. For the Europeans, tulips were totally unheard of. Er…a great novelty. The first bulb to show up in the Netherlands, the merchant who received them roasted and ate them. He thought they were kind of onion. It turns out that the Netherlands was an ideal country for growing tulips. It had the right kind of sandy soil for one thing, but also, it was a wealthy nation with a growing economy, willing to spend lots of money on new exotic things. Plus, the Dutch had a history of gardening. Wealthy people would compete, spending enormous amounts of money to buy the rarest flowers for their gardens. Soon tulips were beginning to show up in different colors as growers tried to breed them specifically for colors which would make them even more valuable. But they were never completely sure what they would get. Some of the most priced tulips were white with purple stricks, or red with yellow stricks on the paddles, even a dark purple tulip that was very much priced. What happened then was a craze for these specialized tulips. We called that craze “tulip mania”. So, here we’ve got all the conditions for an irrational boom: a prospering economy, so more people had more disposable income-money to spend on luxuries, but they weren’t experienced at investing their new wealth. Then along comes a thrilling commodity. Sure the first specimens were just played right in tulips, but they could be bred into some extraordinary variations, like that dark purple tulip. And finally, you have an unregulated market place, no government constrains, where price could explode. And explode they did, starting in the 1630s. There was always much more demand for tulips than supply. Tulips didn’t bloom frequently like roses. Tulips bloomed once in the early spring. And that was it for the year. Eventually, specially-bred multi-colored tulips became so valuable, well, according to records, one tulip bulb was worth 24 tons of wheat, or thousand pounds of cheese. One particular tulip bulb was sold and exchanged for a small sheep. In other words, tulips were literally worth their weight in gold. As demand grew, people began selling promissory notes guaranteeing the future delivery of priced tulip bulbs. The buyers of these pieces of paper would resell the notes and mark up prices. These promissory notes kept changing hands from buyer to buyer until the tulip was ready for delivery. But it was all pure speculation because as I said, there was no way to know if the bulb was really going to produce the variety, the color that was promised. But that didn’t matter to the owner of the note. The owner only cared about having that piece of paper so it could be traded later at a profit. And people were borrowing, mortgaging their homes in many cases to obtain those bits of paper because they were sure they’d find an easy way to make money. So now, you’ve got all the ingredients for a huge bust. And bust it did, when one cold February morning in 1637, a group of bulb traders got together and discovered that suddenly there were no bidders. Nobody wanted to buy. Panic spread like wild fire and the tulip market collapsed totally.

Lecture 2

Biology

Narrator

Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class.

Professor

Ok, I have an interesting plant species to discuss with you today. Um…it’s a species of a very rare tree that grows in Australia, Eidothea hardeniana, but it’s better known as the Nightcap Oak. Now, it was discovered only very recently, just a few years ago. Um… it remained hidden for so long because it’s so rare. There are only about 200 of them in existence. They grow in a rain forest, in a mountain rage…range in the north part of New South Wales which is a…er… state in Australia. So just 200 individual trees in all. Now another interesting thing about the Nightcap Oak is that it is…it

represents…er…a very old type…er…kind of tree that grew a hundred million years ago. Um, we found fossils that old that bear remarkable resemblance to the tree. So, it’s a primitive tree. A…a living fossil you might say. It’s relic from earlier times and it has survived all these years without much change. And it…it’s probably a kind of tree from which other trees that grow in Australia today evolved. Just to give you an idea of what we are talking about. Here’s a picture of the leaves of the tree and its flowers. I don’t know how well you can see the flowers. They’re those little clusters sitting at the base of the leaves. Okay, what have we tried to find out about the tree since we’ve discovered it? Hum…or how…why is…is it so rare? That’s one of the first questions. Um… how is it…um…how does it reproduce? This’s another question. Um, maybe those two questions are actually related. Jim?

Student

Hum …I don’t know. But I can imagine that…for instance, seed disposal might be a factor. I mean if the…er…you know, if the seeds cannot really disperse in the wild area, then, you know, the tree may not colonize new areas. It can’t spread from the area where it’s growing.

Professor

Right. That’s…that’s actually a very good answer. Um, of course, you might think there might not be any areas where the tree could spread into, er…because…um…well, it’s very specialized in terms of the habitat. But, that’s not really the case here. Um…the suitable habitat, that is, the actual rainforest is much larger than the few hectares where the Nightcap Oak grows. Now this tree is a flowering tree as I showed you. Um…um…it produces a fruit, much like a plum. On the inci…inside there’s a seed with a hard shell. It…it appears that the shell has to crack open or break down somewhat to allow the seed to soak up water. You know, if the Nightcap Oak remains…if their seeds remain locked inside their shell, they will not germinate. Actually, the seeds…er…they don’t retain the power to germinate for very long, maybe two years. So there’s actually quite a short window of opportunity for the seed to germinate. So the shell somehow has to be broken down before this…um…germination ability expires. And…and then there’s a kind of rat that likes to feed on the seeds as well. So, given all these limitations, not many seeds that the tree produces will actually germinate. So this is a possible explanation for why the tree does not spread. It doesn’t necessarily explain how it became so rare, but it explains why it doesn’t increase. OK, so it seems to be the case that the species, this Nightcap Oak is not very good at spreading. However, it seems, though we can’t be sure, that it’s very good at persisting as a population. Um…we…there’s some indications to suggest that the population of the Nightcap Oak has not declined over the last er…you know, many hundreds of years. So it’s stayed quite stable. It’s not a remnant of some huge population that is dwindled in last few hundred years for some reason. It’s not necessarily a species in retreat. Ok, so it cannot spread very well, but it’s good at maintaining itself. It’s rare, but it’s not disappearing. Ok, the next thing we might want to ask about the plant like that is what chances does it have to survive into the future. Let’s look at that.

Conversation 2

Narrator

Listen to a conversation between a student and a professor.

Student

Professor Martin?

Professor

Uh, hi, Lisa, what can I do for you?

Student

Well, I’ve been thinking about, you know, what you were saying in class last week, about how we shouldn’t wait until the last minute to find an idea and get started working on our term paper.

Professor

Good, good, and have you come up with anything?

Student

Well, yeah, sort of. See, I’ve never had a linguistics class before, so I was sort of, I mean, I was looking over the course description and a lot of the stuff you described there, I just don’t know what it is talking about, you know, or what it means. But there was one thing that really did jump out at me

Professor

Yes?

Student

The section on dialects, cos…like, that’s the kind of thing that’s always sort of intrigued me, you know?

Professor

Well, that’s certainly an interesting topic. But you may not realize, I mean, the scope...

Student

Well, especially now, cos I’ve got like one roommate who is from the south and another one from New York. And we all talk like totally different, you know?

Professor

Yes, I understand. But…

Student

But then I was noticing, like, we don’t really get into this till the end of the semester, you know. So I…

Professor

So, you want some pointers where to go for information on the subject? Well, you could always start by reading the chapter in the book on social linguistics. That will give you a basic understanding of the key issues involved here.