托福听力十大必背段子(9)
9. 970539 生活段子：游览沼泽地公园
Welcome to Everglade's National Park. The Everglade is a watery plain covered with saw grass that's the home to numerous species of plants and wild life. And one and half million acre is too big to see it all today. But this tour will offer you a good sampling. Our tour bus will stop first at Tailor Slue. This is a good place to start because it's home to many of the plants and animals typically associated with the everglade. You'll see many exotic birds and of course a world famous alligators. Don't worry. There's a boardwalk that goes across the marsh, so you can look down at the animals in the water from a safe distance. The boardwalk is high enough to give you a great view of the saw grass prairie. From there we'll head at some other marshy and even jungle-like areas that feature wonderful tropical plant life. For those of you who'd like a close view of the saw grass prairie, you might consider running a canoe sometime during your visit here. However, don't do this unless you have a very good sense of direction and can negotiate your way through tall grass. We hate to have to come looking for you. You have a good fortune of being here in the winter, the best time of the year to visit. During the spring and summer the mosquitoes will just about to eat you alive. Right now, they are not so bothersome, but you'll soon want to use an insect repellent.
www.xuehuiba.com1. 000139 文科段子：艺术类音乐
It may seem strange that we're discussing music from a Broadway production in this class, "The Lion King" especially, since it's based on a popular Hollywood movie. I mean music preformed for Broadway theater in the heart of New York city surely would seem to be in the western tradition of popular music and not have much in common with the music we have been studying in this course, such as gamelan music of Indonesia, or Zulu chants of South Africa, music that developed outside the western tradition of Europe and America. But in fact, musicians have a long-standing tradition of borrowing front one another's cultures. And this production's director intentionally included both western and non-western music. That way, some of the rhythms, instrument, and harmonies typical of non-western music contrast with and complement popular music more familiar to audiences in North America and Europe, music like rock, jazz or Broadway style show tunes. So I want to spend the rest of this class and most of the next one on the music from the show "The Lion King" as a way of summarizing some of the technical distinctions between typical western music and the non-western music that we've been studying. Now the African influence on the music is clear. The story takes place in Africa. So the director got a South African composer to write songs with a distinctly African sound. And the songs even include words from African languages. But we'll get back to the African influence later. First let's turn to the music that was written for the shadow puppet scenes in "The Lion King", music based on the Indonesian music used in the shadow puppet theater of that region
www.xuehuiba.com2. 000143 理科段子：天文学
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, It the earth was a flat disc, then its shadow during eclipses would not be a prefect 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 the more northerly 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 stadium, that's the plural of the world 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.