PART II

Listening Comprehension

Section A

Directions:

in this section,

you will hear two long conversations.

At the end of each conversation,

you will hear four questions.

 Both the conversation and the questions will be spoken only once.

 After you hear a question, you must choose the best

answer from the four choices marked A), B), C）and D).

Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet

 1 with a single line through the centre.

Conversation One

M: Good morning! Madam. Can I help you?

W: Oh, I do hope so. I have to get to Manchester today

and my own car has broken down. Do you by any chance have a car available?

M：For how many days? Madam.

W: Three, just until the weekend.

M: And what sort of car did you have in mind?

W: Well.  That depends a little bit on the price.

But I normally drive a Chevrolet. Do you have anything like that?

M: Yes, Certainly. That's group C which includes Chevrolets and seaarrows.

W: How much are they?

M: Well, for three days, you would have to have it under the

 unlimited mileage conditions.

 Which will work out cheaper for Manchester anyway.

 Let's see, Group C, three to five days hire with unlimited mileage is 53 pounds per day.

W: I see. Does that include everything?

M: It Includes third party insurance, but it's not include valueadded tax, patrol or CDW.

W: What' that?

M:CDW? Oh, that's the cover you in case you damage the hire car.

Third party insurance only covers you for damage to another vehicle.

 For Group C cars is 6 pounds per day.

W:OK. I think I'll have the Chevrolet.

M: All right. Could I have your driving license please?

W: Certainly. Here we are.

M: So, it's Ms. JB）couty.

W: Yes. That's right.

M: And the number is 509024bc9cs, expiring the 1st, July, 2015.

And you want to take it immediately?

W: Yes, I do, please.

M: Lovely. Well you could just initial that box there for the CDW.

And that box there to confirm you have known driving convictions, thank you, And then sign there.

Great! That's it!ve just heard.

Questions 1 to 4 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

1.Why does the woman want to hire a car?

2.What is the woman's main consideration in hiring a car?

3.hat does the daily charge included?

4.How much will the woman pay in hiring a Chevrolet for 3 days?

Conversation Two

W: So, possible locations for the plant.

First， the basic facilities for the region are generally very good,

 at least between the three main cities, Bilbao, Victoria in the south, and San Sebastian.

 There is now a fast train main to the south of France, and to the rest of Spain.

Although improvements affect Bilbao principally, but the whole region benefits. First,

the port area has been completely modernized and relocated, and the airport has also been extended.

So the basic facilities are good.

M: Right, so are we in the position to choose one of these cities?

W:Well， let's not rush into anything.

 I think it would be a bad idea to assume we are going to choose a city.

 It might be better to think about one of the smaller towns.

M: Smaller places? Yes. So should we get details on the possible places?

W: Yes, we could do that.

But we need, I think first, to check a few things, for example,

tax benefits, grants and anything like that, for locating to a smaller place,

not one of the main cities. Then we can make a better decision.

M: Yes, I agree. You've talked about the improved transport links in Bilbao.

What about the links to the smaller towns?

If it is a mountainous or hilly region,

it could take an hour or more for a truck to reach a main road.

So I think we need to locate specifically at the train and road links for small towns.

W: Yes, you're right. Road and rail, and financial position.

Questions 5 and 8 are based on the conversation you have just heard.

5.What are the speakers discussing?

6.What does the woman say about Bilbao, Victoria and San Sebastian?

7.hat does the woman think they should do?

8.What is the man concerned about?

Section B

Directions:

In this section,

you will hear two passages.

At the end of each passage,

you will hear three or four questions.

 Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once.

 After you hear a question, you must choose the best

answer from the four choices marked A), B), C）and D).

Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet

 1 with a single line through the centre.

Passage One

In a study of older people with sisters and brothers,

psychologist Debra Gold of the Duke Center for the study of aging and human development

 found that about 20% said they were either hostile or indifferent toward their sisters and brothers.

Reasons for this ranged from inheritance disputes to hostility between spouses.

 But, many of those who had poor relationships felt guilty.

 Although most people admitted to some lingering rivalry,

 it was rarely strong enough to end the relationship.

 Only four out of the 55 people interviewed had completely broken with

 their sisters and brothers and only one of the four felt comfortable with the break.

As sisters and brothers advanced into old age,

 closeness increases and rivalry diminishes, explains V.C.,

a psychologist at Purdue University.

 Most of the elderly people he interviewed said they had supportive and friendly dealings and

got along well or very well with their sisters and brothers.

 Only 4% got along poorly. Gold found that as people age,

they often become more involved with and interested in their sisters and brothers.

 53% of those she interviewed said that contact with their sisters and brothers

increase innate adulthood.

 With family and career obligations reduced, many said that they had more time for each other.

 Others said that they felted with time to heal wounds.

A man who had recently reconciled with his brother told Gold there's something

that lets older people to put aside bad deeds of the past and focus a little on what we need now,

 especially when it's sisters and brothers。

Questions 9 to 11 are based on the passage you have just heard.

9.What does the study by Debra Gold find about older people?

10.What has probably caused closeness to increase among sisters

and brothers according to VC?

11.What did the man who had recently reconciled with his brother

 tell Debra Gold about older people?

Passage Two

Monarch butterflies, the large origin black insects,

are common summer sight in northern United States and Canada.

They brighten in parks and gardens as they fly among the flowers.

 What makes monarch butterflies particularly interesting is they migrate,

all the way to California or Mexico in back.

 They are thought to be the only insect that does this.

Every year in the late summer, monarchs begin their migration to the south,

 those heading for Mexico go first for the Louisiana Mississippi region.

And then they fly to go across Mexico into Texas.

 Once in Mexico, they establish themselves in one of about 15 sides in the mountain forth.

Each side provides the winter home for millions of monarchs.

The butterflies are so numerous that they often cover the entire trees.

 When spring comes, they began their long journey north.

The question is often asked whether every butterfly makes the round trip journey every year.

 And the answer is no. The average monarch lives about nine month.

So when flying the north, they might lay eggs in Louisiana and then die.

The eggs of that that generation  may be found in Kentucky,

the eggs of next generation may be in the Kang Michigan.

The last generation of the season about the forth will make the journey back in Mexico

and restart the cycle. Scientists learn about the monarch butterflies' migration by

capturing and placing identifying tags on the insects.

By recapturing the attempt of the monarch and noting where they came from,

the next scientist can figure out things like butterfly's age and its routing.

Questions 12 to 15 are based on the passage you have just heard.

12.What is the unique about the monarch butterfly according to the speaker?

13.Where does the butterfly settle at the end of the migration?

14.What does the speaker say about the monarch butterflies' reproduction?

15.hat is the talk mainly about?

Section C

Directions:

In this section,

 you will hear recordings of lectures or talks followed by three or four questions.

The recordings will be played only once.After you hear a question,

you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A. B. C.and D.

Then mark the corresponding letter

on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.

Recording  One

I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me.

 In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've

experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?

How about a moderate amount of stress?

Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too.

But that is not my confession. My confession is this:

 I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier.

 But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good,

and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people,

stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease.

 Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress,

and today, I want to change yours.

Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study

 tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people,

“How much stress have you experienced in the last year?” They also asked,

“Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?”

 And then they used public death records to find out who died.

Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year

 had a 43 percent increased risk of dying.

But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.

 People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die.

 In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study,

 including people who had relatively little stress.

Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths,

 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.

Questions 16 to 18 are based on the recording you have just heard.

16.Who is the speaker?

17.:What did the speaker do in the last few years?

18.According to the study, which is true?

18:46.61]Recording  Two

War has been a part of my life since I can remember. I was born in Afghanistan,

 just six months after the Soviets invaded,

 and even though I was too young to understand what was happening,

I had a deep sense of the suffering and the fear around me.

Those early experiences had a major impact on how I now think about war and conflict.

 I learned that when people have a fundamental issue at stake, for most of them,

giving in is not an option. For these types conflictswhen people's rights are violated,

when their countries are occupied, when they're oppressed and humiliated

they need a powerful way to resist and to fight back. Which means that no matter

 how destructive and terrible violence is, if people see it as their only choice,

they will use it. Most of us are concerned with the level of violence in the world.

But we're not going to end war by telling people that violence is morally wrong. Instead,

we must offer them a tool that's at least as powerful and as effective as violence.

This is the work I do. For the past 13 years,

I've been teaching people in some of the most difficult situations around the world

 how they can use nonviolent struggle to conduct conflict.

 Most people associate this type of action with Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

 But people have been using nonviolent action for thousands of years.

 In fact, most of the rights that we have today in this countryas women,

 as minorities, as workers, as people of different sexual orientations and citizens concerned

 with the environmentthese rights weren't handed to us.

They were won by people who fought for them and who sacrificed for them.

But because we haven't learned from this history,

 nonviolent struggle as a technique is widely misunderstood.

I met recently with a group of activists, and they told me something that I hear a lot.

 They said they'd already tried nonviolent action, and it hadn't worked.  

Questions 19 to 22 are based on the recording you have just heard.

19:What was the speaker's feeling when she was young?

20.What did the speaker learn from her early experience?

21.What did the speaker do in the past 13 years?

22.Which is true according to the speaker?

Recording  Three

Many years ago, when I was a young congressman,

I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control

the nuclear arms race. And the military historians taught me, during that quest,

that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars,

 and the rare but allimportant global, world warstrategic conflicts.

And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach,

a different organizational model. Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories,

and most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution,

 hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems,

 like acid rain from the Midwest to the Northeast, and from Western Europe to the Arctic,

 and from the Midwest out the Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

And there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but allimportant global,

 or strategic, conflict. Everything is affected.

 And we have to organize our response appropriately.

 We need a worldwide, global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation,

efficiency and a global transition to a lowcarbon economy. We have work to do.

And we can mobilize resources and political will.

But the political will has to be mobilized, in order to mobilize the resources.

Let me show you these slides here.

I thought I would start with the logo.

What's missing here, of course, is the North Polar ice cap.

 Greenland remains. Twentyeight years ago,

this is what the polar ice cap—the North Polar ice caplooked like at the end of the summer,

 at the fall equinox. This last fall, I went to the Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder,

Colorado, and talked to the researchers here in Monterey at the Naval Postgraduate Laboratory.

 This is what's happened in the last 28 years. To put it in perspective,

 2005 was the previous record. Here's what happened last fall that has really unnerved the researchers.

The North Polar ice cap is the same size geographically—doesn't look quite

 the same size—but it is exactly the same size as the United States,

minus an area roughly equal to the state of Arizona.

Questions 23 to 25 are based on the recording you have just heard.

23.According to the speaker, which is true about environmental challenges?

24.Which is not an appropriate response to environmental problems?

25.What do these slides show?