Hi, I’m Jim Black. Before you get started with class today, Doctor Webster(人名） has given me a few minutes to talk to you about the biology department’s ongoing turtle watch project（轻音） down the South Beach（地名）. As many of you probably know, South Beach is an important nesting site（连读） for the green turtle, a type of endangered sea turtle. In the next few days, turtles from several nesting sites re-identified along the beach will hatch and head for the water. The problem is that a lot of these hatchlings will never make it. Raccoons and hungry birds will get many of them before they reach the surf. So we have a 24-hour watch going on now so that volunteers will be on hand to protect the turtles after they hatch. Oh, and we also need someone to notify the owners of beach front homes to leave they yard lights off for the next couple of（连读） weeks. The baby turtles are attracted to artificial lights such as（轻音） torch lights and head lights. In fact, some of them end up on the beach highway（连读）, and are killed by passing cars. So we’re trying to minimize lights on the landward side of the beach. Now if you’re interested, please stop by my office in the biology department and sign（连读） up. What are we asking you to do? We’re asking for at least a 2-hour commitment form each participant. Oh, and please note that turtle-watch activities do not constitute excused absences from class. Thanks.



jackie的听写日志5
Your professor has asked me to talk to you today about the topic that should be of real concern to civil engineers: the erosion of the United States beaches. Let me start with some statistics. Did you know that 90 percent of the coast in this country is eroding, on the Gulf of Mexico（地名） for instance（连读）, erosion averages 4 to 5 feet per year. Over the past twenty years, there has been an increase in（连读） building along the coast, even though geologist and environmentalist have been warning communities about problems like erosion. Someway communities have tried to protect their buildings and roads and to build seawalls. However geologists have found that such stabilizing structure actually speed up the destruction of the beaches. These beaches with seawalls called stabilized beaches are much narrower than beaches without them. You may wonder how seawalls speed up beach loss. The explanation is simple. If the flow of the beaches is gentle, the water energy is lessened as it washes up along the shore. It is reduced even more that returns to the sea so it doesn’t carry back much sand. On the other hand, when the water hit the nearly vertical face of the seawall, it goes straight back to the sea with the full force of its energy and it carries back a great deal of sand. Because of the real risk of losing beaches, many geologists support a ban on all types of stabilizing construction on shore lines.

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-12 16:54 编辑 ]

麻烦lz在一个帖子里听写，不必每篇听写开帖！

The birds you see here in this slide are peregrine falcons. These birds represent a success story among animals on the endangered species list. In the 1970s, the peregrine falcons almost disappeared as a result of the contamination of the food chain by the DDT in pesticide. The presence of the poison in their systems resulted in eggs too weak to support the incubating chicks. Their remarkable recovery is a result of the ban of DDT as a pesticide, aggressive captive feeding programs and their own resiliency. The peregrine falcon is one of the fastest birds alive. They’ve been clocked at 140 to 200 miles per hour in successful pursuit of pray. In addition to speed, these birds fly directly into head winds and they are capable of flying more than 600 miles per day with favorable tail winds. Today with the sophistication of telemetry, the speeds of these birds can be tracked by orbiting satellites, by means of transmitters attached to the bird. For example, peregrine falcons stage in warmer climate, in other words, they spend time in the southern United States awaiting hormonal changes preparing them to breed in the Arctic. Then they migrate north to the much colder Arctic regions. Birds have been tracked from Texas in late April to their nesting ground in Alaska, Canada and Greenland. Now let’s move on to another species of birds, the bald eagles.


slide       n.幻灯片
peregrine falcon     n.游隼
contamination     n.污染
pesticide       n.杀虫剂
incubation    n.孵卵，孵化
resilliency     ???
capative      ???
pursuit        n.追逐，追踪，追赶
hormonal     ad.荷尔蒙的，激素的
track     v.跟踪，尾随
pray

Ok, so in our last class we were discussing big bands swing music, you remember this was a kind of dance music with a steady rhythm. But today we deal with that sort of music played by smaller jazz bands. It’s called bebop. Now bebop makes use all sorts of new types of rhythms, some of them very irregular. We’ll talk more about that later. But first I want to talk about some of the social elements that I believe contributed to the development of bebop music. To do this, we have to look at when bebop arose and started becoming so popular, which was from the late 1930s through the 1940s, from the time of the great depression right into the 2nd World War. Now one factor that certainly helped create the environment for bebop music was the decline of the United States economy. During the great depression, the economy suffered tremendously. And fewer people had money to spend on entertainment. Then during the 2nd World War the government imposed a new tax on public entertainment, what you might call performance tax. The government collected money on performances that included any types of acting, dancing or singing, but not instrumental music. So to avoid this new tax, some jazz bands stop using singers altogether. They started relying on the creativity of the instrumentalist to attract audiences. This was what bebop bands did. Now remember a lot of big bands had singers. So the instrumentalists simply played in the background and had occasional solos while the singers sang the melody to the songs, but not bebop bands. So the instrumentalists had much more freedom to be creative. So they experimented, playing the music faster and using new irregular sorts of rhythms.





swing                vt.挥舞，摆动，使旋转
irregular           ad.不规则的，无规律的，不合常规的
instrumental     ad.乐器的，用乐器演奏的，为乐器谱曲的
instrumentalist   n.演奏乐器者，乐器家
melody             n.主调，旋律，和谐的调子，美妙的音乐

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-14 18:34 编辑 ]

Some of the most practical lessons coming out of research in psychology are the area of memory. People ask why can’t I remember that term from the physics chapter or the date my library book is due. Well for a lot of people, memory may be weak because they don’t use it enough. It’s like a muscle: if you don’t exercise it, it won’t stay strong. That’s why it’s important to keep our minds active, to keep on learning, throughout our lives. We can do this by reading, playing memory games, and seeking out new experiences. It’s my guess though that the lack of mental stimulation is not a problem for students like you. More likely, the lives you all live are so busy and stimulating that this, in itself, may sometimes interfere with learning. Later on we’ll be discussing how information is recalled from memory. But first, the information needs to be recorded, in other words, learned. And for busy people like you and me, that’s where the real problem often lies. If we distract it, or we’re trying to think out what we’re going to do next, the incoming message just might not be getting recorded effectively. And that leads to the first tip for students who want to improve their memories. Give your full attention to the information you hope to retain. Research clearly shows the advantages of this, and also of active learning, of consciously trying to visualize a new fact, perhaps to make a mental picture, even a wildly ridiculous one so the new fact will stick in memory. Let me illustrate that for you here a little more concretely.


stimulate     vt.刺激，激发，促进
visualize      vt.使显现，使形象化
interfere      vi.干涉，干预，妨碍，打扰
distract       vt.分散（注意力等），使分心，娱乐消遣，（被动状态）弄迷糊



太模糊了，太难听了

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-15 16:51 编辑 ]

As you prepare to become elementary school teachers, you’ll be hearing a lot of discussion about the relevance of teaching penmanship. Now years ago when I was studying education in college, reading, writing and arithmetic were the basics of elementary school education. It went without saying that writing meant first and foremost penmanship, that is, the neatness of child’s handwriting. Back then, penmanship was often taught as a separate subject from the first grade right up through the sixth grade, long after the children had moved from writing in block capital letters to cursive script. It was considered so important that sometimes prizes were even awarded for the best handwriting. But when we move ahead a few decades into the 1980’s, we see teachers and administrators and even parents telling us that teaching penmanship is a waste of time. With computers, they said, children can successfully manipulate the keyboard or mouse of their home computers before they can even hold a pencil. This change in attitude had an impact on the classroom. In your homework for this week you’ll be looking at what statewide curriculum standards in the US say about penmanship. You’ll see that in many states, penmanship has been de-emphasized in a required curriculum, especially in the later years of elementary school. In California, for example, the curriculum calls for fourth-grade students to… and I quote, write fluently and legibly in cursive or joined Italics, essentially a level appropriate for fourth-graders. But after this, the curriculum makes no further mention of penmanship in grade five, six or beyond. Any higher level of quality or neatness is simply not among the curricular objectives. Your assignment is to look at what the curricular standards for all fifty states say about penmanship.


cursive        a.草书的，手写体的，草书体的
script          n.手写体，稿本
manipulate vt.使用，操作，巧妙的处理
italics          n.斜体字
foremost     a.最先的，最初的，第一流的，主要的
legibly        adv.易读地，明了地

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-16 16:33 编辑 ]

Recently some anthropologist conducted an interesting case study in ethnology. Now ethnology as you recall, is a branch of anthropology that deals with how various cultures developed and change. The study was about the development of basket weaving by African-American women who live in the town of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The town is known for its high quality sweet grass baskets which were woven by these women, they’ve been weaving the baskets for generations, handing down the skill from mother to daughter. Some of the baskets have been placed on permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The origin of their basket weaving dates back to the 17th century and even earlier when these women’s ancestors came to the United States from the west coast of Africa. Now, it’s mainly a hobby. But back in the 17th and 18th century African American women wove the baskets for use on the rice plantations. There were two types of baskets then: workbasket and baskets for use in the home. The workbaskets were made out of bulrush. Bulrush is a long, tough grass that grows in marshes. One type of workbaskets was the fan basket which was used to separate grains of rice from the waste. The baskets used in the homes were made out of the more delicate sweet grass. They were used for everything from fruit baskets to baby cradles.


ethnology        n.人种学，民族学，人类文化学
weave          v.编织，编结
wove           a.布纹的，网纹的
bulrush         n.灯心草
cradle         n.摇篮

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-18 16:31 编辑 ]

Good evenings, ladies and gentleman, my name is Ellis Brown. As you know, we hold a series of events during the school year on various cultural topics, I am happy there is such a large crowd of both students and professors at this, the second of our time out for the art presentations this year. I think almost every seat is taken. Tonight we’re lucky to have as our guest, a man of considerable fame in the world of music. He began to play the piano at age 5. By the time he was 10, he was already composing and playing his own pieces. He is a graduate of a famous art school in New York City. Our guest has spent the last 45 years of his very successful career touring the world playing concert. We are fortunate that he consented to come and share some of his experiences with us. He has had many adventures along the way, locked instruments, missed connections, no hotel room, locked concert hall and so on. He has played for all of the most well-known conductors, not only in North America, but all over the world. The title of his talk is “The Concert Tour-Forty Years on Four Continents”. Please join me and welcome Mr. Daniel Robertson, one of the foremost pianist of our day.

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-20 16:00 编辑 ]

In ancient times, many people believed the earth was a flat disc. Well over 2,000 years ago, the ancient Greek philosophers were able to put forward two good arguments proving that it was not. Direct observations of heavenly bodies were the basis of both these arguments. First, the Greeks knew that during eclipses of the moon, the earth was between the sun and the moon, and they saw that during these eclipses, the earth’s shadow on the moon was always round, they realized that this could be true only if the earth was spherical. If the earth were a flat disc, then its shadow during eclipses would not be a perfect circle, it would be stretched out into a long ellipse. The second argument was based on what the Greeks saw during their travels. They noticed that the North Star, or Polaris, appeared lower in the sky when they traveled south, in more northernly regions, the North Star appeared to them to be much higher in the sky. By the way, it was also from this difference in the apparent position of the North Star that the Greeks first calculated the approximate distance around the circumference of the earth, a figure recorded in ancient documents says 400,000 stadia, that’s the plural of the word stadium. Today, it’s not known exactly what length one stadium represents, but let’s say, it was about 200 meters, the length of many athletic stadiums. This would make the Greek’s estimate about twice the figure accepted today, a very good estimate for those writing so long before even the first telescope was invented.



disc      n.盘，圆片，圆盘形表面，圆片形物
heavenly        adj.天国的，天空的
eclipse        n.（日，月）食
sphericle         adj.球的，球状的
plural          adj.复数的，多于一个的

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-21 16:23 编辑 ]

In the 18th century French economists protested the excessive regulation of business by the government. Their motto was “laisser faire”. “Laisser faire” means “let the people do as they choose”. In the economic sense, this meant that while the government should be responsible for things like maintaining peace and protecting property rights, it should not interfere with private business. It shouldn’t create regulations that might hinder business growth, nor should it be responsible for providing subsidies to help. In other words, governments should take a hand off approach to business. For a while in the United States, laisser faire was a popular doctrine. But things quickly changed. After the Civil War, politicians rarely opposed the governments’ generous support of business owners. They were only too glad to support government land grants and loans to railroad owners for example. Their regulations kept tariffs high and that helped protect American industrialists against foreign competition. Ironically in the late 19th century, a lot of people believed that the laisser faire policy was responsible for the countries industrial growth. It was generally assumed that because business owners did not have a lot of external restrictions placed on them by the government, they could pursue their own interests and this was what made them so successful. But in fact, many of these individuals would not have been able to meet their objectives if not for government support.



laisser faire        n.放任，自由主义
subsidy          n.助学金，津贴，补助金，奖金，（国家间的）财政援助，政府特拨款
doctrine        n.（宗教或政府方面的）教旨，学说，主义
tariff           n.关税制度，关税率
external          adj.外部的，外面的

[ 本帖最后由 gjw 于 2008-8-22 16:27 编辑 ]