听力小短文英语

At a gathering of students from China and some other countries,Yang Weiping and Virginia Wang, both first-year college students,are talking about their learning of English.

Hello, my name is Yang Weiping.I'm a freshman at Peking University and I'm majoring in chemistry.At college we have to study a foreign language.I choose English because I like listening to English programs on the radio and TV.I also like British and American pop songs.Some day I hope to visit Britain and the United States.I started learning English several years ago and I'm getting better at it.My favorite activity is listening,especially listening to songs and stories.My big problem is, however, speaking.I feel nervous whenever I speak.And I never seem to know what to say when people talk to me.But I've decided to overcome my shyness and learn to speak English by speaking as much as I can.

Hi, my name is Virginia Wang.I'm a library science major at the National University of Singapore.In our country, English is important.It is one of the official languages and you have to be fluent in English to get a good job.I've been studying English since high school.I'm good at reading because I like learning about new things and new ideas.There are so many books and articles written in English.Our textbooks at the university are in English, too.I know writing is also very important,but I find it really difficult.When I graduate from the

university,I would like a job in the city library where I can read all kinds of new books.

Questions

1. Which of the following would be the best title for the two talks?

2. Who are the speakers?

I find listening most difficult,because I worry about the words I don't know.Now I'm trying to focus on the general idea,not worrying about the new words.This makes me feel good,because I know I've understood something.Then, I listen again carefully and if I have any problems I play the difficult parts again.In this way I come to understand better both the main idea and the details of the listening text.

听力技能的培养和提高高职高专英语教学的一项重要任务。下面是我精心收集的英语六级听力短文原文，希望大家喜欢!

W: Grag Rosen lost his job as a sales manager nearly three years ago, and is still unemployed.

M: It literally is like something in a dream to remember what is like to actually be able to go outand put in a day's work and receive a day's pay.

W: At first, Rosen bought groceries and made house payments with the help fromunemployment insurance. It pays laid-off workers up to half of their previous wages whilethey look for work. But now that insurance has run out for him and he has to make toughchoices. He's cut back on medications and he no longer helps support his disabled mother. It isdevastating experience. New research says the US recession is now over. But many peopleremain unemployed and unemployed workers face difficult odds. There is literally only one jobopening for every five unemployed workers. So four out of five unemployed workers haveactually no chance of finding a new job. Businesses have downsized or shut down acrossAmerica, leaving fewer job opportunities for those in search of work. Experts who monitorunemployment statistics here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, say about 28,000 people areunemployed, and many of them are jobless due to no fault of their own. That's where theBucks County CareerLink comes in. Local director Elizabeth Walsh says they provide trainingand guidance to help unemployed workers find local job opportunities. "So here's the jobopening, here's the job seeker, match them together under one roof," she said. But the lack ofwork opportunities in Bucks County limits how much she can help. Rosen says he hopesCongress will take action. This month he launched the 99ers Union, an umbrella organization of18 Internet-based grassroots groups of 99ers. Their goal is to convince lawmakers to extendunemployment benefits. But Pennsylvania State Representative Scott Petri says governmentssimply do not have enough money to extend unemployment insurance. He thinks the bestway to help the long-term unemployed is to allow private citizens to invest in local companiesthat can create more jobs. But the boost in investor confidence needed for the plan to workwill take time. Time that Rosen says still requires him to buy food and make monthly mortgagepayments. Rosen says he'll use the last of his savings to try to hang onto the home he workedfor more than 20 years to buy. But once that money is gone, he says he doesn't know whathe'll do.

W: Earlier this year, British explorer Pen Huddle and his team trekked for three months acrossthe frozen Arctic Ocean, taking measurements and recording observations about the ice.

M: Well we'd been led to believe that we would encounter a good proportion of this older,thicker, technically multi-year ice that's been around for a few years and just gets thicker andthicker. We actually found there wasn't any multi-year ice at all.

W: Satellite observations and submarine surveys over the past few years had shown less ice inthe polar region, but the recent measurements show the loss is more pronounced thanpreviously thought.

M: We're looking at roughly 80 percent loss of ice cover on the Arctic Ocean in 10 years,roughly 10 years, and 100 percent loss in nearly 20 years.

W: Cambridge scientist Peter Wadhams, who's been measuring and monitoring the Arctic since1971 says the decline is irreversible.

M: The more you lose, the more open water is created, the more warming goes on in that openwater during the summer, the less ice forms in winter, the more melt there is the followingsummer. It becomes a breakdown process where everything ends up accelerating until it's allgone.

W: Martin Sommerkorn runs the Arctic program for the environmental charity the WorldWildlife Fund.

M: The Arctic sea ice holds a central position in the Earth's climate system and it's deterioratingfaster than expected. Actually it has to translate into more urgency to deal with the climatechange problem and reduce emissions.

W: Summerkorn says a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warmingneeds to come out of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December.

M: We have to basically achieve there the commitment to deal with the problem now. That'sthe minimum. We have to do that equitably and we have to find a commitment that is quick.

W: Wadhams echoes the need for urgency.

M: The carbon that we've put into the atmosphere keeps having a warming effect for 100 years.So we have to cut back rapidly now, because it will take a long time to work its way through intoa response by the atmosphere. We can't switch off global warming just by being good in thefuture, we have to start being good now.

W: Wadhams says there is no easy technological fix to climate change. He and other scientistssay there are basically two options to replacing fossil fuels, generating energy with renewables,or embracing nuclear power.

M: From a very early age, some children exhibit better self-control than others. Now, a newstudy that began with about 1，000 children in New Zealand has tracked how a child's low self-control can predict poor health，money troubles and even a criminal record in their adultyears. Researchers have been studying this group of children for decades now. Some of theirearliest observations have to do with the level of self-control the youngsters displayed.Parents, teachers, even the kids themselves, scored the youngsters on measures like "actingbefore thinking" and "persistence in reaching goals. " The children of the study are now adultsin their 30s. Terrie Moffitt of Duke University and her research colleagues found that kids withself-control issues tended to grow up to become adults with a far more troubling set of issuesto deal with.

W: The children who had the lowest self-control when they were aged 3 to 10, later on had themost health problems in their 30s, and they had the worst financial situation. And they weremore likely to have a criminal record and to be raising a child as a single parent on a very lowincome.

M: Speaking from New Zealand via skype, Moffitt explained that self-control problems werewidely observed, and weren't just a feature of a small group of misbehaving kids.

W: Even the children who had above-average self-control as pre-schoolers, could havebenefited from more self-control training. They could have improved their financial situation andtheir physical and mental health situation 30 years later.

M: So, children with minor self-control problems were likely as adults to have minor healthproblems, and so on. Moffitt said it's still unclear why some children have better self-controlthan others, though she says other researchers have found that it's mostly a learned behavior,with relatively little genetic influence. But good self-control can be set to run in families in thatchildren who have good self-control are more likely to grow up to be healthy and prosperousparents.

W: Whereas some of the low-self-control study members are more likely to be single parentswith a very low income and the parent is in poor health and likely to be a heavy substanceabuser. So that's not a good atmosphere for a child. So it looks as though self-control issomething that in one generation can disadvantage the next generation.

M: But the good news is that Moffitt says self-control can be taught by parents and throughschool curricula that have proved to be effective. Terrie Moffitt's paper on the link betweenchildhood self-control and adult status decades later is published in the Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences.