托福听力_考前小试牛刀（二）

Student

Yeah, that’s what I thought. So I started reading the chapter, you know, about how everyone speaks some dialect of a language. And I’m wondering like, well, how do we even manage to understand each other at all?

Professor

Ah, yes, an interesting question. You see…

Student

So then I read the part about dialect accommodation. You know, the idea that people tend to adapt their speaking to make it closer to the speech of whomever they’re talking to, and I’m thinking, yeah, I do that when I talk with my roommates, and without even thinking about it or anything, you know.

Professor

OK, all right. Dialect accommodation is a more manageable sort of topic.

Student

So I was thinking like, I wonder just how much other people do the same thing. I mean, there are students here from all over the place. Does everyone change the way they talk to some degree depending on whom they are talking to?

Professor

You’d be surprised.

Student

So, anyway, my question is, do you think it’d be OK if I did a project like that for my term paper? You know, find students from different parts of the country, record them talking to each other in different combinations, report on how they accommodate their speech or not, that kind of thing?

Professor

Tell you what, Lisa, write me up a short proposal for this project, how you’re going to carry out the experiment and everything, a design plan. And I think this’ll work out just fine.

Lecture 3

Creative Writing

Narrator

Listen to part of a lecture in a creative writing class.

Professor

Alright everybody, the topic for today is, well, we’re gonna take a look at how to start creating the characters for the story you’re writing. One way of doing that is to come up with what’s called “a character sketch”, I don’t mean a sketch like a drawing, I guess that’s obvious. It’s um…it’s a…a sketch as a way of getting started on defining your characters’ personalities. To begin, how do we create fictional characters? We don’t just pull them from thin air, do we? I mean we don’t create them out of nothing. We base them, consciously or unconsciously, we base them on real people, or we blend several people’s traits, their attributes into one character. But when people think fiction, they may assume the characters come from the author’s imagination. But the writer’s imagination is influenced by… by real people, could be anyone, so, pay attention to the people you meet, someone in class, at the gym, that guy who is always sitting in the corner of the coffee house, um… your cousin, who’s always getting into dangerous situations. We’re pulling from reality, gathering bits and pieces of real people. You use these people, and the bits of behavior or characteristics as a starting point as you begin to sketch out your characters. Here is what you should think about doing first. When you begin to formulate a story, make a list of interesting people you know or have observed. Consider why they’re unique or annoying. Then make notes about their unusual or dominant attributes. As you create fictional characters, you’ll almost always combine characteristics from several different people on your list to form the identity and personality of just one character. Keeping this kind of character sketch can help you solidify your character’s personality, so that it remains consistent throughout your story. You need to define your characters, know their personalities so that you can have them acting in ways that are predictable, consistent with their personalities. Get to know them like a friend, you know your friends well enough to know how they’ll act in certain situations, right? Say you have three friends, their car runs out of gas on the highway. John gets upset. Mary remains calm. Teresa takes charge of handling the situation. And let’s say, both John and Mary defer to her leadership. They call you to explain what happen. And when John tells you he got mad, you’re not surprised, because he always gets frustrated when things go wrong. Then he tells you how Teresa took charge, calmed him down, assigned tasks for each person and got them on their way. Again, you’re not surprised. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Well, you need to know your characters, like you know your friends. If you know a lot about a person’s character, it’s easy to predict how they’ll behave. So if your character’s personalities are well defined, it will be easy for you as the writer to portray them realistically…er… believably, in any given situation. While writing character sketches, do think about details. Ask yourself questions, even if you don’t use the details in your story, um…what does each character like to eat, what setting does each prefer, the mountains, the city, what about educational background, their reactions to success or defeat, write it all down. But, here I need to warn you about a possible pitfall. Don’t make you character into a stereotype. Remember the reader needs to know how your character is different from other people who might fall in the same category. Maybe your character loves the mountains and has lived in a remote area for years. To make sure he is not a stereotype, ask yourself how he sees life differently from other people who live in that kind of setting. Be careful not to make him into the cliché of the “ragged mountain dweller”. Okay, now, I’ll throw out a little terminology. It’s easy stuff. Major characters are sometimes called “round characters”. Minor characters are sometimes called, well, just the opposite, “flat”. A round character is fully developed; a flat character isn’t, character development is fairly limited. The flat character tends to serve mainly as a motivating factor. For instance, you introduce a flat character who has experienced some sort of defeat. And then your round, your main character who loves success and loves to show off, comes and boasts about succeeding and jokes about the flat character’s defeat in front of others, humiliates the other guy. The flat character is introduced solely for the purpose of allowing the round character to show off.

Lecture 4

Earth Science

Narrator

Listen to part of a lecture in an earth science class.

Professor

We’re really just now beginning to understand how quickly drastic climate change can take place. We can see past occurrences of climate change that took place over just a few hundred years. Take uh… the Sahara Desert in Northern Africa. The Sahara was really different 6,000 years ago. I mean, you wouldn’t call it a tropical paradise or anything, uh…or maybe you would if you think about how today in some parts of the Sahara it…it only rains about once a century. Um… but basically, you had granary and you had water. And what I find particularly interesting and amazing really, what really indicates how un desert-like the Sahara was thousands of years ago, was something painted on the rock, pre-historic art, hippopotamuses, ‘cos you know hippos need a lot of water and hence? Hence what?

Student

They need to live near a large source of water year round

Professor

That’s right.

Student

But how is that proved that the Sahara used to be a lot wetter? I mean the people who painted those hippos, well, couldn’t they have seen them on their travels?

Professor

Okay, in principal they could, Karl. But the rock paintings aren’t the only evidence. Beneath the Sahara are huge aquifers, basically a sea of fresh water, that’s perhaps a million years old filtered through rock layers. And…er…and then there is fossilized pollen, from low shrubs and grasses that

once grew in the Sahara. In fact these plants still grow, er…but hundreds of miles away, in more vegetated areas. Anyway, it’s this fossilized pollen along with the aquifers and the rock paintings, these three things are all evidence hat the Sahara was once much greener than it is today, that there were hippos and probably elephants and giraffes and so on. So what happened? How did it happen? Now, we’re so used to hearing about how human activities are affecting the climate, right? But that takes the focus away from the natural variations in the earth climate, like the Ice Age, right? The planet was practically covered in ice just a few thousand years ago. Now as far as the Sahara goes, there is some recent literature that points to the migration of the monsoon in that area

Students

Huh?