TOEFL_exercise_2

SCRIP FOR TEST TWO

PART B

Question31-34.Listen to the following news release broadcast over the radio.

Man：Good evening, this is Jim Davis reporting for Coast Radio. In the local news tonight, the North Coast Solar Car Competition is

about to begin. In the studio with us is Barbara Allen to tell us

more about the event. Welcome to the studios, Barbara. Woman：Thanks, Jim. The competition involves solar vehicles of all kinds.

We don’t have any restrictions about sponsors, so we have

entries from large corporations as well as local universities and

individual entrants. One of the special things about the North

Coast Competition is that the area is not ideal for solar power.

The reputation that the area has for being constantly overcast

with cool temperatures make it ideal for demonstrating the real

progress of solar vehicle technology.

Woman：That’s where most solar car competitions are held, because it allows the cars to perform at their peak levels. The problem

with tests performed under optimum conditions is that they

tend to favor the more sophisticated vehicles that are turned to

take advantage of conditions that will never be encountered by

most people. This race is important because it often favors

vehicles which might seem inferior under other conditions. Man: Well, how many vehicles will there be this year?

Woman：We have two hundred entries, but they will be leaving in sets of three every half hour so the roads won’t need to be blocked off.

We would like to advise all motorists to be extra careful today

because the solar vehicles are known to break down In the

middle of busy thoroughfares.

Man: Okay，Barbara. Thanks a lot for stopping by.

Questions 35~38. Listen to a conversation between two friends on a beach.

Man: Hi, Michael, look what I just found. Right here in the sand. Woman: A piece of wood? Oh, driftwood, interesting shape. Almost like some sort of modern sculpture.

Man: Y eah, and feel how smooth it is.

Woman: Mm…, must have been in the water s long time. It could have been drifting in the ocean currents for months, or even years. Man: In the currents. Does n’t the wind just below things around out there?

Woman: Well, sure. But the currents were always moving, too, almost like the rivers, but underwater rivers, flowing through the

ocean.

Man: So how have they found out where these currents go? Stick a message in a bottle and throw it in the water?

Woman: Don’t laugh. In fact, I was reading in a science magazine that oceanographers have released a huge number of bottles into the

ocean over the years. They wanted to map out where the

currents would carry them.

Man: Say, I bet after they have found out where all those bottles ended up, they can enter all that data into a computer and make

a pretty detailed model to show where the currents go. Woman: In fact, they did. And they also found the neat way to teat that model. There was a freighter carrying sneakers from a factory

in Asia. It was caught in a big storm and thousands of pairs of

sneakers got dumped into the Pacific Ocean.

Man: Really? What a waste!

Woman: Yeah. Turns out, though, that hundreds of these shoes started washing up on beaches somewhere near Seattle, just about

where the computer models had predicted the currents would

carry them.

Man: Gee, you mean all that stuff I found on the beaches might be part of some big scientific experiment? I thought it was all just

trash.

PART C

Questions39-42.Listen to an advertisement for a campus organization.

Come into the Center for international Students sometime soon. We may be able to assist you in making your stay in a foreign country a pleasant one. We act, without charge, as an information outlet for foreign students looking for volunteer work and opportunities to participate in their communities. More than a quarter of the international students enrolled at this college have found rewarding opportunities in a variety of exciting fields with the help of the center. V olunteering in your community can have rewards that many students may never think of. In addition to making new friends and trying exciting new activities, you can also develop skills that can lead to a career.

Although it is a wonderful thing to volunteer to help your community just because you want to help others, being a volunteer can be excellent way to help yourself too. If you are interested in a career in the medical field, you can choose between a wide variety of different volunteer positions that will give you the hands-on experience that really counts when you enter the fields as a professional. Engineering students will find that there are a number of projects sponsored by the school that are in the need of volunteer help. These projects range from solar power

experiments to work with lasers and computers.

First -year students frequently carry too busy a schedule to allow time for volunteer work .However, many second and third year students, and especially senior students, often find they have a little extra time in the week. Our office specializes in helping you find a schedule that allows you to manage both your volunteer work and your class schedule. Please be sure to stop in for a free consultation next time your are on campus.

Question 43-45. Listen to a radio news story.

A lot of people in the United States are coffee drinkers. Over the last few years, a trend has been developing to introduce premium specially blended coffees known as gourmet coffees into the American market.

Boston seems to have been the birthplace of this trend. In fact, major gourmet coffee merchants from other cities like Seattle and San Francisco came to Boston, where today they are engaged in a kind of coffee war with Boston’s merchants. They are all competing for a significant share of the gourmet coffee market. Surprisingly, the competitions among these leading gourmet coffee businesses will not hurt any of them.

Experts predict that the gourmet coffee market in the United States is growing and will continue to grow to the point that gourmet coffee will

soon capture half of what is now a one-point-five-million-dollar market and will be an eight-million-dollar market by 1999. Studies have shown that coffee drinkers who convert to gourmet coffee seldom go back to the regular brands found in the supermarkets. As a result, these brands will be the real losers in the gourmet coffee competition.

Questions 46~50. Listen to part of a lecture on birds given by a biologist.

Many egg-laying animals merely lay their eggs and leave. Turtles, for instance, and horse-shoe crabs, the eggs hatch and the little ones are on their own. The current theory about birds is that the earliest birds did just that when they were cold-blooded creatures living in warm place. However, when they became warm-blooded creatures living in cold places, they had to remain on the eggs to keep them warm. The process we call incubation. For this, they needed a place, a nest. V ery likely, the first nests were just primitive depressions scraped in the ground. Even now many species still lay eggs in this sort of crude nest. In fact, in every spring a mother killdeer lays her eggs in some pebbles along the edge of the parking lot just outside this building. Primitive nests on the ground were fine for some birds but others began to elevate their nests in branches, perhaps to avoid predators. These early elevated nests were

probably loose platforms of sticks and twigs, the types still built by ospreys and most herons today. The latest evolvement in nest, the mast recent version, so to speak, is the cup-shaped nest. This is the one we regard today as the typical bird’s nest, you know, like a robin’s nest.