Unit 1
Section One Tactics for Listening
Listening and Translation 1. A college education can be very costly in the United States.
在美国，大学教育的费用会很贵。 2. Rising costs have led more and more families to borrow money to help pay for college.
费用的上涨使越来越多的美国家庭通过借钱来支付上大学的费用。 3. There are different federal loans and private loans for students.
有各种各样的联邦贷款和私人贷款可供学生挑选。
4. Interest rates on some of these loans will go up on July 1st.
在这些贷款品种中，有些品种的利率将从7月1日起上调。
5. There are growing concerns that many students graduate with too much debt.
人们越来越担心，很多学生将背着沉重的债务从大学毕业。
Section two Listening Comprehension
Part 1 Dialogue-Social Grouping
Interviewer: Right. You're talking about social groupings
here. Could you tell us something about the ways animals form into groups
Nike Down: Yes. Er, many, many animals are very solitary*
animals. The only times they get together is when they mate, or when they're bringing up their young. The majority of animals are solitary, but a very significant group of mammals and insects, like ants and termites*, bees and wasps, are very social and they group together because in a group it's much safer. You can defend yourself more easily if you're in a group, you can find males more easily if you're in a group, and you can change the world around you by working with the others if you live in a group. Solitary animals have a much more difficult time in many ways.
Interviewer: You mentioned lions and other carnivores*
earlier on. Do they group very much
Nike Down: Yes. Most cats in fact don't group. Er, lions and,
to a lesser extent, cheetahs* are the only cats
that group together. A group of lions is called a pride*, and you might get anything up to 15 or 20 lions in a pride. A pride of lions would have perhaps two or three males, perhaps a dozen females, and then the cubs. But the real lion group consists of females with their cubs. The males tend to stay for a few years and then they get kicked out by a group of younger males that come in and take over.
Interviewer: And how about the apes
Nike Down: Ah, well, now you're talking about the group
of animals that we belong to. Apes — some apes — live in very, very big and complicated social groups. Not all. Orangutans*, for example, big apes that live in Indonesia and Malaysia — they're very solitary and one adult may meet another adult only once every two or three years, when a male and a female mate, and then, the only relationship will be between a mother and her baby. The baby will stay with the mother for two or three years, four years, five years even, learning from the mother, learning what sorts of foods to eat, what the signs of danger are, and then when the baby grows up, off it'll go, and live its own solitary life. The reason why
orangutans are solitary is because there's not very much food in a forest and if there was a big group of orangutans, all the food would just run out. But, leaving Asia and going to Africa, then you find very social apes. Now, gorillas, for example. Gorillas live in unimale* groups. They used to be called harems*, but the technical term is unimale because there's one male within the group; one male, and then around him will be anything up to six, seven, eight, nine females, plus all the babies. And that one male in the group is the silverback gorilla, and he's much bigger and stronger than the others. He's got silvery fur on his back and the others won't challenge him and he'll lead the group slowly through the forest, settling down every night and moving on the next day, finding food. So that's a unimale group. But if you move a little bit further west into West Africa, you'll start to come across chimpanzees. Now they're a bit smaller than gorillas. They spend a lot of time in the trees, whereas gorillas are down on the ground. And chimpanzees are much more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. They're our closest living relatives. Now chimps* live in multimale
groups; in other words, you'll get, oh, anything up to six, seven, eight males, then you'll get two or three times that number of females — a dozen, two dozen females — plus all the youngsters, so we're talking about groups that can be as big as 40 or 50 or even 60. Now a chimpanzee group — multimale group — is a very flexible type of group. It constantly splits into smaller groups. Off they go for a few days, back they come, reform, break up again. And within that group the males tend to hang around the outside, protecting the group, fighting off rival males that might want to come in and mate with the females, but they tend to come and go to some extent. The ongoing core of the chimpanzee group consists of females with their young and sometimes sisters will actually work together to bring up their young collectively. Yes, so apes are very, very social animals indeed.
Exercise
Directions: Listen to the dialogue and choose the best answer to complete each of the following sentences. 2. C 3. D 4. C 5. B 6. C 7. B 8. A
Part 2 Passage Community Colleges
听力教程4unit1听力原文主编：施心远
