Part B
Directions: You will hear four dialogues or monologues. Before listening to each one, you will have 5 seconds to read each of the questions which accompany it. While listening, answer each question by choosing A, B, C or D. After listening, you will have 10 seconds to check your answer to each question. You will hear each piece ONLY ONCE.
听力原文:M: Excuse me. Have you been waiting long?
W: About ten minutes.
M: Did you notice whether No. 7 bus has gone by?
W: Not while I've been standing here. I'm waiting for the number seven myself.
M: Good. Hot today, isn't it?
W: Yes, it is. I wish that it would rain and cool off.
M: Me, too. This is unusual for March. I don't remember it ever being so hot and dry in March before.
W: You're from Florida then.
M: Not really. I was horn in New York, but I've lived here for ten years now.
W: My mother and I have just moved here from Indiana.
M: Pretty cold in Indiana, isn't it?
W: Yes. That's why we moved. But we didn't know that it would be so hot here. We should have gone to California. Do you think that we've missed the bus?
M: No, it's always a little late.
W: I have twenty to one, but my watch is a little fast.
M: Don't worry. It never comes exactly on the half-hour like it should.
According to the conversation, what kind of weather is usual for March?
A. Cold.
B. Very hot.
Cooler than on the day of this conversation.
Drier than on the day of this conversation.
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Part A
Directions: You will hear 10 short dialogues. For each dialogue, there is one question and four possible answers. Choose the correct answer ― A, B, C or D, and mark it in your test booklet. You will have 15 seconds to answer the question and you will hear each dialogue ONLY ONCE.
听力原文:M: I agreed with your plan at the meeting this morning: It was an excellent one.
W: You should have supported it then--when I needed it.
What does the woman mean?
A. She lost her face during the meeting.
B. She agreed that it was an excellent meeting.
C. The plan should be put forward.
D. He would have supported the plan this morning.
听力原文: Years ago before there were refrigerators, an icehouse was a building used for storing ice. The first icehouses were in the cellars of farmhouses. Pieces of ice, mixed with snow and meadow grass, were piled in winter and kept until the following summer. Soon farmers began to build separate houses for storing ice. These icehouses had double walls with hay stuffed between to keep out any heat. Blocks of ice were put inside the icehouse and packed with straw or sawdust.
Where did the ice for these icehouses come from? Workers took it from a frozen pond or river. They sawed the ice into even blocks. Then they pulled the ice blocks from the water with hooks and carried them to the icehouses on sleds. Special tools helped the workers cut and handle the ice. Ice axes chopped large holes !n the ice. Ice saws cut the ice into even blocks. Choppers loosened these blocks from one another. Ice hooks fastened themselves into the large blocks. Then they could be carried over the frozen surface of the pond or river. Tongs were used to pick up the smaller blocks of ice. Ships carded ice all over the world. In 1799 the first boatload in the United States was sent from New York City to icehouses in New Orleans, Louisiana. A boatload was sent from Boston, Massachusetts, to the West Indies to help fight yellow fever in 1805. Ice merchants in Boston also shipped tons of ice from ponds and rivers to cities in Europe.
(30)
A. Separate houses were built for storing ice.
B. Double walls were built in icehouses to keep cool.
C. Blocks of ice were packed with weed in icehouses.
D. Ice was put into icehouses in winter.
听力原文:W: Hi, Peter. I was surprised to see you in the class in Children's Literature yesterday. Are you also majoring in elementary education?
M: No, I'm not. But as a psychology major, I can use this to fulfill the requirement in developmental psychology.
Q: What do you learn from the conversation?
(14)
A. The two speakers are classmates.
B. The man is majoring in elementary education.
C. The woman is majoring hi elementary education.
D. The two speakers got to know each other in a class.
America's Brain Drain Crisis
Losing the Global Edge
William Kurtz is a self-described computer geek. A more apt description might be computer genius. When he was just 11, Kunz started writing software programs, and by 14 he had created his own video game. As a high school sophomore in Houston, Texas, he won first prize in a local science fair for a data encryption(编密码) program he wrote. In his senior year, he took top prize in an international science and engineering fair for designing a program to analyze and sort DNA patterns.
Kunz went on to attend Carnegie Mellon, among the nation's highest-ranked universities in computer science. After college he landed a job with Oracle in Silicon Valley, writing software used by companies around the world.
Kunz looked set to become a star in his field. Then he gave it all up.
Today, three years later, Kurtz is in his first year at Harvard Business School. He left software engineering partly because his earning potential paled next to friends who were going into law or business. He also worried about job security; especially as more companies move their programming overseas to lower costs. "Every time you're asked to train someone in India, you think, 'Am I training my replacement?'" Kunz says.
Things are turning out very differently for another standout in engineering, Qing-Shan Jia. A student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Jia shines even among his gifted cohorts(一群人) at a school sometimes called "the MIT of China". He considered applying to Harvard for his PhD, but decided it wasn't worth it.
His university is investing heavily in cutting-edge research facilities, end attracts an impressive roster of international professors. "I can get a world-class education here end study with world-class scholars," Jia says,
These two snapshots(快照) illustrate part of a deeply disturbing picture. In the disciplines underpinning the high-tech economy-math, science and engineering---America is steadily losing its global edge. The depth and breadth of the problem is clear:
- Several of America's key agencies for scientific research and development will face a retirement crisis within the next ten years.
- Less than 6% of America's high school seniors plan to pursue engineering degrees, down 36% from a decade ago.
- In 2000, 56% of China's undergraduate degrees were in the hard sciences; in the United States, the figure was 17%.
- China will likely produce six times the number of engineers next year than America will graduate, according to Mike Gibbons of the American Society for Engineering Education. Japan, with half America's population, has minted (铸造) twice as many in recent years.
"Most Americans are' unaware of how much science does for this country end what we stand to lose if we can't keep up," says Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. David Baltimore, president of the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel laureate, puts it bluntly: "We can't hope to keep intact our standard of living, our national security, our way of life, if Americans aren't competitive in science."
The Crisis Americans Created
In January 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission, tasked with finding solutions to America's major national security threats, concluded that the failures of America's math and science education and America's system of research "pose a greater threat...than any potential conventional war."
The roots of this failure lie in primary and secondary education. The nation that produced most of the great technological advances of the last century now scores poorly in international science testing. A 2003 survey of math and science literacy ranked American 15-year-old
A. Y
B. N
C. NG