-
Conversation One
M:
Guess what? The worst
food I've ever had was in France.
W:
Really? That's odd. I
thought the French were all good cooks.
M:
Yes. That's right. I
suppose it's really like anywhere else, though.
You know, some places
are good. Some
bad. But it's really all our own fault.
W:
What do you mean?
M:
Well, it was the first
time I'd been to France. This was years ago when I
was at school. I
went there with my
parents' friends, from my father's school. They'd
hired a coach to take them to
Switzerland.
W:
A
school trip?
M:
Right. Most
of them had never been abroad before. We'd crossed
the English Channel at
night, and we
set off through France, and breakfast time
arrived, and the coach driver had arranged
for us to stop at this little
café
. There we all were, tired and
hungry, and then we made the great
discovery.
W:
What was that?
M:
Bacon and
eggs.
W:
Fantastic! The real
English breakfast.
M:
Yes.
Anyway, we didn't know any
better
—
so we had it, and
ugh...!
W:
What was it like?
Disgusting?
M:
Oh, it was
incredible! They just got a bowl and put some fat
in it. And then they put some
bacon in
the fat, broke an egg over the top and put the
whole lot in the oven for about ten minutes.
W:
In the oven! You're
joking. You can't cook bacon and eggs in the oven!
M:
Well. They must have done
it that way. It was hot, but it wasn't cooked.
There was just
this egg floating about
in gallons of fat and raw bacon.
W:
Did you actually eat it?
M:
No! Nobody did. They all
wanted to turn round and go home. You know, back
to teabags
and fish and chips. You
can't blame them really. Anyway, the next night we
were all given another
foreign
speciality.
W:
What was
that?
M:
Snails. That really
finished them off. Lovely holiday that was!
Questions 1 to 4 are based on the
conversation you have just heard.
Question 1. What did the woman think of
the French?
Question 2. Who did the man
travel with on his first trip to Switzerland?
Question 3. What does the man say about
the breakfast at the little French
café
?
Question 4. What did
the man think of his holiday in France?
Conversation Two
1
M: You say your shop has
been doing well. Could you give me some idea of
what “doing
well” means in
facts and figures?
W: Well,
“doing well” means averaging
￡
1,200 or more a week for
about 7 years, making
almost a quarter
of a million pounds. And “doing well” means your
earnings are rising. Last year,
we did
slightly over 50,000 and this year, we hope to do
more than 60,000. So, that's good if we
continue to rise.
M: Now,
that's gross earnings, I assume. What about your
expenses?
W: Yes, that's gross. The
expenses, of course, go up steadily. And since
we've moved to this
new shop, the
expenses have increased greatly, because it's a
much bigger shop. So I couldn't say
exactly what our expenses are. They are
something in the region of six or seven thousand
pounds a
year, which is not high.
Commercially speaking, it's fairly low, and we try
to keep our expenses as
low as we can.
M: And your prices are much lower than
the same goods in shops round about. How do the
local shopkeepers feel about having a
shop doing so well in their midst?
W:
Perhaps a lot of them don't realize how well we
are doing, because we don't make a point
of publicizing. That was a lesson we
learned very early on. We were very friendly with
all local
shopkeepers and we happened
to mention to a local shopkeeper how much we had
made that week.
He was very unhappy and
never as friendly again. So we make a point of
never publicizing the
amount of money
we make. But we are on very good terms with all
the shops. None of them have
ever
complained that we are putting them out of
business or anything like that. I think it's a
nice
friendly relationship. Maybe if
they did know what we made, perhaps they wouldn't
be so friendly.
Questions 5 to 8 are
based on the conversation you have just
heard.
Question 5. What are
the speakers mainly talking about?
Question 6. What does the woman say her
shop tries to do?
Question 7. What do
we learn about the goods sold at the woman's shop?
Question 8. Why doesn't the woman want
to make known their earnings anymore?
Passage One
Birds
are famous for carrying things around.
Some, like homing pigeons, can be
trained to deliver messages and packages.
Other birds unknowingly carry seeds
that cling to them for the ride.
Canadian scientists have found a
worrisome, new example of
the power
that birds have to
spread stuff around.
Way
up
north
in
the
Canadian
Arctic,
seabirds
are
picking
up
dangerous
chemicals
in
the
ocean and
delivering them to ponds near where the birds
live.
Some 10,000 pairs of the birds,
called fulmars, a kind of Arctic seabird, make
their nests on
Devon Island, north of
the Arctic Circle.
2
The fulmars travel some 400 kilometers
over the sea to find food.
When
they
return
home,
their
droppings
end
up
all
around
their
nesting
sites,
including
in
nearby ponds.
Previously,
scientists noticed pollutants arriving in the
Arctic with the wind.
Salmon also carry
dangerous chemicals as the fish migrate between
rivers and the sea.
The bodies of fish
and other meat-eaters can build up high levels of
the chemicals.
To
test
the
polluting
power
of
fulmars,
researchers
collected
samples
of
deposit
from
11
ponds on Devon Island.
In
ponds
closest
to
the
colony,
the
results
showed
there
were
far
more
pollutants
than
in
ponds
less affected by the birds.
The
pollutants in the ponds appear to come from fish
that fulmars eat when they're out on the
ocean.
People who live,
hunt, or fish near bird colonies need to be
careful, the researchers say.
The birds
don't mean to cause harm, but the chemicals they
carry can cause major problems.
Questions 9 to 12 are based on the
passage you have just heard.
Question 9. What have Canadian
scientists found about some seabirds?
Question 10. What does the speaker say
about the seabirds called fulmars?
Question 11. What did scientists
previously notice about pollutants in the Arctic?
Question 12. What does the speaker warn
about at the end of the talk?
Passage
Two
In recent years, the
death rate among American
centenarians
—
people who
have lived to age
100 or
older
—
has decreased,
dropping 14 percent for women and 20 percent for
men from 2008
to 2014.
The
leading causes of death in this age group are also
changing.
In 2000, the top five causes
of death for centenarians were heart disease,
stroke, flu, cancer
and Alzheimer's
disease.
But
by
2014,
the
death
rate
from
Alzheimer's
disease
for
this
age
group
had
more
than
doubled
—
increasing from 3.8 percent to 8.5
percent
—
making the
progressive brain disease the
second
leading cause of death for centenarians.
One
reason
for
the
rise
in
deaths
from
Alzheimer's
disease
in
this
group
may
be
that
developing this condition remains
possible even after people beat the odds of dying
from other
diseases such as cancer.
People physically fit enough to survive
over 100 years ultimately give in to diseases such
as
Alzheimer's which affects the mind
and cognitive function.
In other words,
it appears that their minds give out before their
bodies do.
On the other hand, the death
rate from flu dropped from 7.4 percent in 2000 to
4.1 percent in
3
2014.
That pushed flu from
the third leading cause of death to the fifth.
Overall, the total number of
centenarians is going up.
In 2014,
there were 72,197 centenarians, compared to 50,281
in 2000.
But
because
this
population
is
getting
larger,
the
number
of
deaths
in
this
group
is
also
increasing
—
18,434 centenarians died in 2000, whereas 25,914
died in 2014.
Questions 13 to 15 are
based on the passage you have just
heard.
Question 13. What
does the speaker say about the risk of dying for
American centenarians in
recent years?
Question 14. What does the speaker say
about Alzheimer's disease?
Question 15.
What is characteristic of people who live up to
100 years and beyond?
Recording
One
Okay. So let's get
started.
And to start things off I
think what we need to do is consider a definition.
I'm going to define what love is but
then most of the experiments I'm going to talk
about are
really focused more on
attraction than love.
And I'm going to
pick a definition from a former colleague, Robert
Sternberg, who is now the
dean at Tufts
University but was here on our faculty at Yale for
nearly thirty years.
And
he
has
a
theory
of
love
that
argues
that
it's
made
up
of
three
components:
intimacy,
passion, and
commitment, or what is sometimes called decision
commitment.
And these are relatively
straightforward.
He argued that you
don't have love if you don't have all three of
these elements.
Intimacy is the feeling
of closeness, of connectedness with someone, of
bonding.
Operationally, you could think
of intimacy as you share secrets, you share
information with
this person that you
don't share with anybody else.
Okay.
That's really what intimacy is, the bond that
comes from sharing information that isn't
shared with other people.
The second element is passion.
Passion is the drive that leads to
romance.
You can think of it as
physical attraction.
And Sternberg
argues that this is a required component of a love
relationship.
The
third
element
of
love
in
Sternberg's
theory
is
what
he
calls
decision
commitment,
the
decision that one is in a love
relationship, the willingness to label it as such,
and a commitment to
maintain that
relationship at least for some period of time.
Sternberg would argue it's not love if
you don't call it love and if you don't have some
desire
to maintain the relationship.
4
So if
you have all three of
these,
intimacy, passion and commitment, in Sternberg's
theory
you have love.
Now
what's interesting about the theory is what do you
have if you only have one out of three
or two out of three.
What do
you have and how is it different if you have a
different two out of three?
What's
interesting about this kind of theorizing is it
gives rise to many different combinations
that can be quite interesting when you
break them down and start to look them carefully.
So
what
I've
done
is
I've
taken
Sternberg's
three
elements
of
love,
intimacy,
passion
and
commitment,
and
I've
listed
out
the
different
kinds
of
relationships
you
would
have
if
you
had
zero,
one, two or three out of the three elements.
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the
recording you have just heard.
Question 16. What does the speaker say
about most of the experiments mentioned in his
talk?
Question 17. What does Robert
Sternberg argue about love?
Question
18.
What
question
does
the
speaker
think
is
interesting
about
Sternberg's
three
elements of love?
Recording
Two
Hi! I am Elizabeth
Hoffler, Master of Social Work.
I
am
a
social
worker,
a
lobbyist,
and
a
special
assistant
to
the
executive
director
at
the
National Association of Social Workers.
Today we are going to be talking about
becoming a social worker.
Social work
is the helping profession.
Its
primary
mission
is
to
enhance
human
well-being
and
help
meet
the
basic
needs
of
all
people,
with a particular focus on those who are
vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty.
We often deal with complex human needs.
Social
work
is
different
from
other
professions,
because
we
focus
on
the
person
and
environment.
We deal with the external factors that
impact a person's situation and outlook.
And we create opportunity for
assessment and intervention, to help clients and
communities
cope effectively with their
reality and change that reality when necessary.
In
thousands
of
ways
social
workers
help
other
people,
people
from
every
age,
every
background, across the country.
Wherever needed, social workers come to
help.
The most well-known aspect of the
profession is that of a social safety net.
We help guide people to critical
resources and counsel them on life-changing
decisions.
There
are
more
than
600,000
professional
social
workers
in
the
country,
and
we
all
either
have a
bachelor's degree, a master's degree, or a PhD in
Social Work.
5
There
are
more
clinically
trained
social
workers
than
clinically
trained
psychiatrists,
psychologists, and psychiatric nurses
combined.
Throughout this series you
will learn more about the profession, the
necessary steps to get a
social work
degree, the rich history of social work, and the
many ways that social workers help
others.
Later in this
series, you will hear from Stacy Collins and Mel
Wilson, fellow social workers
at the
National Association of Social Workers.
Stacy is going to walk you through the
step-by-step process of becoming a social worker,
and
Mel will tell you about the range
of options you have once you get your social work
degree, as
well as the high standards
of responsibility he social workers must adhere
to.
The National Association of Social
Workers represents nearly 145,000 social workers
across
the country.
Our
mission is to promote, protect, and advance the
social work profession.
We hope you
enjoy this series about how you can make a
difference by becoming a social
worker.
Next, we are going to talk about
choosing social work.
Questions 19 to
22 are based on the recording you have just
heard.
Question 19. What
does the speaker mainly talk about?
Question 20. What do social workers
mainly do?
Question
21.
What
do
professional
social
workers
have
in
common,
according
to
the
speaker?
Question 22. What is Mel Wilson going
to talk about in the series?
Recording
Three
Today,
I'd
like
to
talk
about
what
happens
when
celebrity
role
models
get
behind
healthy
habits, but at the
same time, promote junk food.
Currently,
there's
mounting
criticism
of
Michelle
Obama's
“Let's
Move!”
campaign,
which
fights
childhood
obesity
by
encouraging
youngsters
to
become
more
physically
active,
and
has
signed
on
singer
Beyoncé
and
basketball
player
Shaquille
O'Neal,
both
of
whom
also
endorse
sodas, which are a major contributor to
the obesity epidemic.
Now
there's
a
lot
more
evidence
of
how
powerful
a
celebrity
—
especially
a
professional
athlete
—
can be
in influencing children's behavior.
In
a
report
published
by
the
Rudd Center
for
Food
Policy
and
Obesity
at
Yale
University,
researchers
studied 100 professional athletes and their
endorsement contracts.
The
team
focused
on
athletes
since
they
are
theoretically
the
best
role
models
for
active,
healthy lifestyles for children.
After
sorting
the
deals
by
category,
they
determined
that
among
the 512
brands
associated
6