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.

Now you will haer the two long conversations

Conversation 1

W: Now, could you tell me where the idea for the business first came from?

M: Well, the original shop was opened by a retired printer by the name of Gruby.

Mr Gruby, being lefthanded himself,

thought of the idea to try to promote a few products for lefthanders.

W: And how did he then go about actually setting up the business?

M: Well, he looked for

any lefthanded products that might already be on the market

which were very few. And then contacted the manufactures with the idea of having products produced for him,

mainly in the scissors range to start with.

W: Right. So you do commission some part of your stock.

M: Yes, very much so. About 75 percent of our stock is specially made for us.

W: And the rest of it?

M: Hmm, the rest of it now, some 25, 30 years after Mr. Gruby's initial efforts,

there are more lefthanded product actually on the market.

Manufactures are now beginning to see that there is a market for lefthanded products.

W: And what's the range of your stock?

M: The range consists of a variety of scissors from children scissors

to scissors for tailors, hairdressers etc. We also have a large range of kitchen ware.

W: What's the competition like? Do you have quite a lot of competition?

M:There are other people in the business now in specialists,

but only as mailorder outlets.

But we have a shop here in central London plus a mailorder outlet.

And we are without any doubt the largest supplier of the lefthanded items.

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

Q 1：What kind of business does the man engaged in?

Q 2：What does the man say about his stock of products?

Q 3：What does the man say about other people in his line of business?

Q 4:How long was it since Mr. Grudy's original shop was opened?

Conversation 2

M:Can we make you an offer? We would like to run the campaign for four extra weeks.

W: Well, can we summarize the problem from my point of view? First of all,

the campaign was late. It missed two important trade affairs.

The ads also did not appear into key magazines. As a result, the campaign failed.

Do you accept that summary of what happened?

M: Well, the delay wasn't entirely our fault.

You did in fact make late changes to the specifications of the advertisements.

W: Uh, actually, you were late with the initial proposals so you

have very little time and in fact, we only asked for small changes.

M: Well whatever, can we repeat our offer to run the campaign for 4 extra weeks?

W: That's not really the point. The campaign missed two key trade affairs. Because of this,

we are asking you either to repeat the campaign next year for free,

or we only pay 50% of the fee for this year.

M: Could we suggest a 20% reduction to the fee together with the four week sustention to the campaign？

W: We are not happy. We lost business.

M: I think we both made mistakes. The responsibility is on both sides.

W: Ok, let's suggest a new solution. How about a 40% cut in fee, or a free repeat campaign?

M:Well, let's take a break, we're not getting very far. Perhaps we should think about this.

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

Q 5:What do we learn about the man's company?

Q 6:Why was the campaign delayed according to the man?

Q 7:What does the woman propose as a solution to the problem?

Q 8:What does the man suggest they do at the end of the conversation?

Section B. Directions:

In this section, you will hear two passages.

At the end of each passage, you will hear some 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

There are roughly three New Yorks.

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here,

who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable.

Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is swallowed up by locusts each day

 and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who

was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last, the city of final destination,

the city that has a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's highstrung disposition,

 its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements.

 Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity;

 but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up

a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape

the indignity of being observed by her neighbors,

or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart,

it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love,

each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer,

each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

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

Q 9:What does the speaker say about the natives of New York?

Q 10:What does the speaker say commuters give to New York?

Q 11:What do we learn about the settlers of New York?

Passage 2

The University of Tennessee's Walters Life Sciences building,

is a model animal facility, spotlessly clean,

 careful in obtaining prior approval for experiments from an animal care committee.

Of the 15,000 mice house there in a typical year, most give their lives for humanity.

 These are good mice and as such won the protection of the animal care committee.

(13)At any given time, however, some mice escape and run free. These mice are pests.

They can disrupt experiments with the bacteria organisms they carry.

 They are bad mice and must be captured and destroyed. Usually,

 this is accomplished by means of sticky traps,

a kind of fly paper on which they become increasingly stuck.

 But the real point of the cautionary tale, says animal behaviorist Herzau,

is that the labels we put on things can affect our moral responses to them.

Using stick traps or the more deadly snap traps would be deemed unacceptable for good mice.

Yet the killing of bad mice requires no prior approval.

 Once the research animal hits the floor and becomes an escapee, says Herzau,

its moral standard is instantly diminished. (19)In Herzau's own home,

there was more ironic example when his young son's pet mouse Willy died recently,

it was accorded a tearful ceremonial burial in the garden. Yet even as they mourned Willy,

 says Herzau, he and his wife were setting snap traps to kill the pest mice in their

 kitchen with the bare change in labels from pet to pest,

the kitchen mice obtained totally different moral standards.

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

Q 12:What does the passage say about most of the mice used for experiments?

Q 13:Why did the socalled bad mice have to be captured and destroyed?

Q 14:When are mice killed without prior approval?

Q 15:Why does the speaker say what the Herzau's did at home is ironical?

Section C

Directions:

In this section,

you will hear recordings of lectures or talks followed by some 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.

Passage 1

Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 16 to 19.

 It's my pleasure now to introduce this year's commencement speaker.

 Maybe that's enough: scientist, engineer, comedian, author, inventor,

 he is a man with a mission to help for us to scientifically literate society and to help people

everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work.

Making science entertaining and accessible is something that Bill's been doing for most of his life.

 He graduated from Cornell with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering,

after which he moved to Seattle to work as an engineer with Boeing.

It was there that he began to combine his love of science with this flare for comedy.

Eventually he made the transition from engineer to comedy writer and performer.

And Bill Nye the Science Guy was born.

The television program by that name would inspire an entire generation to become

 interested in science and my guess is many of you are here this morning.

How many of you remember who are fans of the show? He won 7 Emmy Awards for writing,

performing and producing the show.

 The show won 18 Emmies in 5 years including 7 for sound design which were shared

 by UMass Lowell's sound recording technology alum. Tom McGurk who's here with us today.

He has since hosted 4 other television series and continued

to educate and entertain and fight for science's place in education and in our national conversation.

His recent television appearances on the reality of danger of climate

change and the importance of science education have included NBC's Meet the Press,

 CNN's Crossfire, Late Night with Seth Meyers and last week,

in a very, very funny piece Tonight with John Oliver on HBO. It was a great piece.

16.According to the speaker, which of the following statements is wrong?

17.How many Emmy Awards did Bill win?

18.How many television series did he host?

19.What is his recent television appearances about?

Passage 2

Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 20 to 22.

I think of songs, music that influence my life a lot.

Bob Dylan sang ‘you're right from your side as right from mine.

We're both just one too many mornings.

And a thousand miles behind.’ You know the words we're a little different

and that was all we're gonna look at it peacefully.

 Dave Mason sing 'there ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy,

there's only you and me, and we just disagree. It's a good way to even have partings'.

Uh, there's a type of bigotry in this world that's prominent you have to be like me,

 or you're not good. Get that out of your soul.

 It's like if you use a certain platform of computer and somebody else uses another.

 Don't put them down and call them bad.

 Appreciate them that they have a brain and that they made a choice.

 And if their choice works for them,

 it's still good. You don't really have to say the whole world has to be like me.

You know sometimes we have a metaphor for life call the river.

 But the river, you're just sort of flowing in it.

You're not a participant, you're not a proponent.

I'd love to think of it more like driving your car.

And what are some of the rules when I got my driver's license and

 I was on the freeway for the first time, cars would want to merge in.

 I would back off and let them merge in and I said to myself we are all going somewhere.

 we're all gonna get there, we're all gonna help each other.

It's OK to use your brakes as a human brain and your own brain, too.

20.How many singers did the speaker mentioned?

21.hat did the speaker compared life to?

22.In the sentence “It's OK to use your brakes…” , what does “use your brakes” mean?

Passage 3

Now listen to the following recording and answer questions 23 to 25.

As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas.

 We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of

 our DNA with chimpanzees. What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them

 only really by a few nucleotides? And as we get farther and farther with our science,

 we get more and more into a discomforted zone where we have to acknowledge that the

 simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic.

 So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life.

 One of the places we're seeing it, for example, in our culture today,

 in the United States today, is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life.

 We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human,

 such that it has a different right than a fetal life.

We have very difficult conversations nowadays—probably not out in the open as much as

within medicine—about the question of when somebody's dead.

 In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead.

 At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose,

and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet.

If it stopped twitching, you bury them. But today,

we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings.

And as a consequence, we're stuck with having to struggle with this really difficult question

 about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation

where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before.

Now you might think that all this breakingdown of categories would make somebody like

 me really happy. I'm a political progressive,

I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous.

Understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense.

 And it makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy.

So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you that I'm a huge

fan of the Founding Fathers. I know they were racists,

I know they were sexist, but they were great. I mean,

 they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did that

 I find myself watching that cheesy musical “1776” every few years,

and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable.

 It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers.

The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists,

 and this is why. What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with

 another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years.

So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy,

 and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy.

 The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA,

but they did have a concept of birthright. They had a concept of blue blood.

 They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political

power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth.

 The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept,

 and that concept was all men are created equal.

 They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was

 the commonality of anatomy,not the difference in anatomy,

 and that was a really radical thing to do.

23.How did our ancestors judge somebody's death?

24.According to the speaker, what did the Founding Fathers resist?

25.Which of the following statement about Founding Fathers is wrong?