Practice One Buried Alive Words You Need to Know
cemetery coffin whiskey
Exercise 1:Directions:You are going to hear five sentences from the passage. Listen carefully and write them down.
1)For an hour the doctor rubbed whiskey on Max's lips and warmed hid body.
2)A week later Max was playing with his friends.
3)Max's parents buried their son in the town cemetery.
4)Max's parents and a neighbour hurried to the cemetery.
5)His mother dreamed that Max was moving in his coffin.
Exercise 2 Directions:Listen to the passage and put the sentences you have written down in Ecercise 1 in the cor_rect order according to the sequence of the events.
In 1865, in a small town in Germany, a little boy was very sick. His name was Max Hoffman.
"Will our son die?" Max's parents asked the doctor.
"Maybe," the doctor said quietly. "Stay with Max. Keep him warm. That's all you can do."
For three days Max lay in his bed. Then he died. He was only five years old.
Max's parents buried their son in the town cemetery. That night Max's mother had a terrible dream.
She dreamed that Max was moving in his coffin. She screamed in her sleep.
"Sh, sh," her husband said. "It's all right. You had a bad dream."
The next night Max's mother screamed in her sleep again. She had the same terrible dream.
On the third night Max's mother had another bad dream. She dreamed that Max was crying.
She got out of bed and got dressed. "Quick! Get dressed," she told her husband.
"We're going to the cemetery. I want to see Max. I want to dig up his coffin."
At four o'clock in the morning Max's parents and a neighbor hurried to the cemetery.
They dug up Max's coffin and opened it. There was Max. He looked dead. But he wasn't lying on his back.
He was lying on his side.
Max's father carried Max home. Then he ran to get the doctor.
For an hour the doctor rubbed whiskey on Max's lips and warmed his body. Then Max opened his eyes.
Max was alive! A week later he was playing with his friends.
Max Hoffman died-really died-in the United States in 1953. He was 93 years old.
Exercise 3:Directions:Listen to the passage again and decide whether the following statements are true (T)or false (F).
1)Max Hoffman really died in his nineties.
2)His mother dreamed Max moved in the coffin.
3)Max's father took his wife's first dream seriously.
4)Max remained in the same position in the coffin when it was opened.
5)Max had stayed in the coffin for five nights.
Practice Two A Gory Lab Experiment
Words You Need to Know
primitive superstition rat inject mice Houston
Exercise 1:Directions:Listen to the passage and answer the following questions briefly.
Primitive man would, as the story goes, eat the hearts of animals he killed.
He would eat the heart of a lion to gain the lion's courage.
"Superstition," you may say. Well, listen to this from the world of science.
Dr George Ungar of Baylor University in Houston says that learned information can be passed to other animals from ones who did the learning.
Dr Ungar trained rats to prefer lighted boxes to dark boxes. How did he do this to rats that usually preferred the dark?
He shocked any rat who went into a dark area. After five to eight days the rats learned that a more peaceful life could be lived in lighted boxes.
They got to love the light
Then he killed the rats. He injected part of their trained brains into 638 mice.
These mice had shown they liked the dark. He put parts of the brains of untrained rats into 132 other mice.
These mice also liked the dark.
Result? Animals that got the trained brains spent an average of 63 seconds in the dark.
Animals that got the untrained brains averaged 118 seconds in the dark.
The figures are very important. Normally only one mouse out of 5,000 would choose the light by chance.
Maybe eating the heart of a lion might not be a bad idea! (221 words)
1)Why would primitive man eat the heart of a lion he killed?
2)What do rats naturally prefer?
3)How long do rats take to learn to choose a more peaceful life in Dr Ungar's experiment?
4)What is the proportion of mice that would prefer the light by chance?
5)What can be passed to other animals from the ones who did the learning, according to Dr Ungar?
Exercise 2:Directions:Listen to the passage again and fill in the table with what you get from the recording.
Practice Three "I Killed a Newborn Baby"
Words You Need to Know
confession euthanasia inquiry
conscience deform illegitimate
morphine David Maclay Glasgow Birmingham
Exercise 1:Directions:Listen to the passage and decide which choice is the best answer to each of the questions.
Thousands of people heard this dramatic confession in a radio broadcats on euthanasia.
Last night, as the police began inquiries, Dr David Maclay told of the killing he kept secret for 40 years.
"My conscience is clear," he said.
The baby, born in Glasgow, was badly deformed.
Dr Maclay said the mother had five illegitimate children. She was in no state to be consulted.
"A colleague and I both felt the same way," he said.
"I don't know if we said anything to each other. But we asked the sister for a gram of morphine, and injected it there and then."
"I would prefer to call it 'freeing someone from a living death.'”
"After all these years, I still believe it was the right thing to do," he said.
"I don't think we even told the mother what had happened."
Dr Maclay, now 66, practices part-time at Birmingham's children's clinics. (156 words)
1)How long had the killing been kept a secret?
2)What did Dr Maclay do before killing the baby?
3)Why did the doctor kill the baby?
4)Where did he probably make the confession to the public?
5)How did Dr Maclay feel about the killing?
Exercise 2:Directions:Listen to the passage again and complete Dr Maclay's confession with what you get from the recording.
Practice Four A Dangerous Joke
Words You Need to Know
registration destination
Exercise 1:You are going to hear five sentences from the passage.
Listen carefully and write them down.
1)Two men jumped into the cab and asked me to drive.
2)The policeman and the two men apologized to me.
3)The taxi driver tood the two men and me to the destinations.
4)The taxi driver was drinking some coffee at a nearby coffee shop.
5)I went to the taxi stand and found only one taxi with on driver in it.
Exercise 2 Directions:Listen to the passage and put the sentences you have written down in Exercise 1 in the cor_rect order according to the seqrence of the events.
One day last week, I needed a taxi. I went to the taxi stand, but there was only one taxi with no driver in it.
I looked around and saw the taxi driver drinking some coffee at a nearby coffee shop
I decided to wait there. As I waited, either the driver would come back to the taxi,
or another one would comealong. So I leaned against the cab, read my newspaper, and waited.
Suddenly, two men jumped into the cab and said, "To 101st Avenue and Main street, and hurry!"
"No," I said. "I can't. Sorry."
"What do you mean ? You can't? Get in and drive! "
"No, I'm sorry, I can't," I said again.
"If you don't take us there, we'll call the police," they insisted.
So they called over a policeman, who was standing on the corner.
"What seems to be the problem here?" asked the policeman.
"He won't take us where we want to go," complained the man.
"Let me see your registration," ordered the policeman.
"I don't have any," I said innocently.
"Well, then, if you don't have a registration, I'll have to arrest you."
Just as the officer began to lead me away, the real taxi driver came out of the coffee shop.
He saw all of us in front of his cab and wanted to know that the matter was.
After listening to the whole story, the driver asked:
"Did it ever occur to you that he wasn't the driver? I'm the driver. Let this guy go, get in the cab, and I'll take you all to your destinations."
The two men and the officer apologized to me and insisted on paying for my ride. (283 words)
Exercise 3:Directions:Listen to the passage again and answer the following questions briefly.
1)Why did the speaker lean against the cab?
2)Why did the two men call over a policeman?
3)Why did the policeman want to arrest the speaker?
4)What was the misunderstanding?
5)Why didn't the speaker explain his identity?
Happy Minute
Listen to the following short story and enjoy yourself. And think about the question:What do you think of the boy in the story?
Jenny was out for a walk one day when she came to a gate in a fence.
"I wonder," she said to herself, "where this leads to?" She went through it and immediately came face to face with a very fiercelooking dog.
It made her nervous.
"Does your dog bite?" she asked the boy who was standing beside the dog.
"No, it doesn't," he replied. Jenny leaned forward to pat the dog on the head.
"Nice doggie," she said. But the dog immediately jumped at her and, as she ran for safety towards a tree,
it ran after her, growling, and tore a piece of cloth from her coat.
"I thought you said your dog didn't bite," she said to the boy as she hung from a branch of the tree.
"That's right," he replied. "It doesn't . But this isn't my dog."
Lesson Two Fascinating Mysteries
Practice One Stonehenge Words You Need to Know
fascinating archaeological ditch intrigue
astronomical observatory concentric
Merlin King Arthur Ireland Dane
Exercise 1:Directions:Listen to the passage and answer the following two questions briefly.
Stonehenge is a fascinating archaeological site located in southwestern England.
It is a small but impressive site of structures consisting of concentric circles made of earth and stonework.
Its rings of stones, ditches, pits, and banks have intrigued people for hundreds of years.
Who built Stonehenge? Why?
There have been many ideas about the origin of Stonehenge.
One story told in the Middle Ages said that Merlin, King Arthur's magician, brought Stonehenge to England from Ireland.
In the seventeenth century, John Webb credited Stonehenge to the Romans, believing they had constructed it as a temple
Others believed that it had been built by the Danes as a place to elect kings.
Today, many scientists believe that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory, calendar,
and "computer", constructed over centuries by several different groups to serve different purposes. (135 words)
1)What is the passage mainly about?
2)How long did it take to build Stonehenge, according to the scientists today?
exercise 2:Directions:Listen to the passage again and complete the following chart with the information you get from the tape.
Exercise 3:Directions:Listen to the passage for the third time and find the words used in the passage which are paraphrased in italics in the following sentences.
Change the form when necessary.
Practice Two Easter Island
Words You Need to Know
flourish yield interpret mystique
testimony statue Easter
Exercise 1:Directions:Listen to the passage and decide whether the following statements are true (T)or false (F).
Easter Island is one of the hundreds of Pacific islands that were formed from volcanic eruptions thousands of years ago.
It is, however, the only one of these islands that carries its own mystiques.
First, it is isolated:It lies two thousand miles from the South American coat and fourteen hundred miles from the nearest inhabited islands.
But more importantly, it is a place where a mysterious civilization once flourished,
leaving behind more than a thousand huge stone statues as testimony to its greatness.
The first Europeans came to the island in 1722, when three Dutch ships landed on Easter Sunday.
Since that time, thousands of archaeologists have come to Easter Island to study the great stone statues,
some of which weigh over a hundred tons. The archaeologists' work has yielded many answers,
but we may never understand all of the history behind these stone faces.
Even after a century of study, the written language found on the island has not been interpreted.
In addition, no one knows for certain how the stone statues were transported or even why they were built. (182 words)
1)Easter Island is the only Pacific island that has ever been found.
2)The Dutch were the first Europeans coming to the island.
3)Archeaologists understand the written language found on the island.
Exercise 2:Directions:Listen to the passage again and answer the following questions briefly.
1)When did the first Europeans come to the island?
2)Can you explain why it was named "Easter Island"?
3)What does the passage imply about the civilization of the island?
Exercise 3:Directions:Listen to the passage for the third time and fill in the chart with the information you get from the tape.
Practice Three Abandoned Ships
Words You Need to Know
canary entry harbor destination
log book freighter drift Carribbean
Havana Rosalie Rubicon
Exercise 1:Directions:Listen to the passage and decide whether the following statements are true (T)or false (F).
The Rosalie was a French ship. In 1840 it sailed across the Atlantic to the Carribbean.
But it never got to Havana, its destination. Another shiop found the Rosalie sailing along with all the sails up.
The ship was in perfect order but there were no people. Not one sailor; no crew at all.
The only living thing on board was a canary. Nobody knows what happened.
But it was not only the Rosalie. In September, 1944, the Rubicon, a freighter carrying cargo
left Havana harbor. The last entry in the captain's log book was for September the 26th and it said that the ship was in Havana harbor.
There were no other entries. A few days later, another ship found the Rubicon drifting with no crew.
It was like the Rosalie-no people. There was just one hungry dog.
Possibly the crew got into the life boats, as there was no sign of them.
But why did they leave the dog? The search found no bodies, no boats, no life jackets, nothing at all to solve the mystery. (176 words)
1)The Rosalie and the Rubicon were both French ships.
2)There was no life on either of the ships when they were found.
3)People were sure that the crew on the Rubicon must have left the ship safely.
4)People don't know what happened to both ships since there are not clues on them.
Exercise 2:Directions:Listen to the passage again and fill in the missing information according to the passage.
Practice Four Loch Ness Monster
Words You Need to Know
monster mist
lorry Loch Ness
Exercise 1:Directions:Listen to the passage and answer the following questions briefly.
I've lived here beside Loch Ness since I retired last year. My house has a good clear view of the loch.
In fact, it's only about a hundred meters from the lake,
and there's nothing but the road in between. Now I had never been interested in the Loch Ness monster,you understand.
Until last Tuesday, I thought it was just a good story to attract tourists.
But I've had changed my mind after last Tuesday's experience.
I got up as usual at about seven o'clock and went into my garden. I looked around,
and something attracted my attention on the Loch. There was almost no mist that morning,
and I could see that there was something moving quite fast, going north, in the middle of the loch.
It looked like a giant snake, with its head and parts of its body about water, and it was moving very fast.
I imagined that it was about thirty meters long. I ran into the house to get my camera,
but when I got back it had gone.
I waited for about five minutes and then it appeared again, this time nearer the road and my house,
so I could see it clearly. I had a good view of it about two minutes and I managed to take several photographs of it.
The photographs haven't come out very well, unfortunately, but one or two of them show the creature quite clearly.
At one point it swam straight towards me, but then a lorry passed on the road, and perhaps it heard the noise of the engine because it disappeared again.
I suppose the whole incident lasted for about fifteen minutes, because I looked at my watch the last time I saw it,
and it said a quarter past seven. I've never seen anything so strange in my life. (305 words)
1)How far is the speaker's house from the lake?
2)Why had the speaker never been interested in the Loch Ness monster?
3)How was the weather that morning?
4)How were the photographs the speaker took?
5)How long did the whole incident last?
6)What is this passage mainly about?
Exercise 2:Directions:Listen to the passage again and tick ( )the statements containing the information you hear about the monster.
Exercise 3:Directions:Find out from the passage the words which are similar in meaning to the expressions listed on the left column below