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2003年英语专业八级考试听力原文
PART Ⅰ
LISTENING COMPREHENSION
SECTION A TALK
When we talk about a modern company, we usually have managers, employees, products, research and development or marketing in mind. However, in reality, a company is not just made up of these elements. There are other things that make a company what it is. This morning, we are going to look at some other aspects of a company. Let’s first take a look at the offices. The physical surroundings of most modern companies, especially offices are becoming more and more similar. Although there are some differences from country to country, one office looks much like another. Office furniture and equipment tends to be similar, desks, chairs, filing cabinets, computers, etc. “What is important about offices?”you may ask, “What the atmosphere of the work place can often influence the effectiveness of a company’s employees?”Modern offices are more spacious and better laid, heated, ventilated and airconditioned than in the past. But of course, this is the feature that varies from firm to firm, and may be dependant on the size of the company and its cooperate philosophy. In some comanies, the employees work in large, open-plan offices without walls between the departments; in others, the staff members work more privately in individual offices. No matter what the office’s law is like, modern companies pay special attention to the physical surroundings in order to create an atmosphere conducive to higher working efficiency. Another related point when talking about offices is the work relations with other people at the place of work. They include relationships with fellow employees, workers or colleagues. A great part of work or job satisfaction, some people say the major portion, comes from getting on with others at work. Work relations were also included those between management and employees. These relations are not always straightforward, particularly as the management's assessment of how your performing can be crucial to your future career.
Now I’d like to say a bit more about the relations between management and employees. There will also be matters about which employees will want to talk to the management. In small businesses, the boss will probably work alongside his or her workers. Anything that needs to be sorted out will be done face to face as soon as the problem arises. There will be no formal meetings for procedures. But the larger the business, the less direct contact there will be between employees and management. Special meetings have to be held and procedures set up to say when, where, how and what circumstances the employees can talk to the management. Some companies have specially organized consultive committees for this purpose. In many countries of the world today, particularly in large firms, employees join a trade union and ask the union to represent them to the management. Through the union all categories of employees can pass on the complaints they have and try to get things changed. The process, through which unions negotiate with management on behalf of their members is called, collective bargaining. Instead of each employee trying to bargain alone with the company, the employees join together and collectively put forward their views. Occasionally a firm will refuse to recognize the right of a union to negotiate for its members, and its dispute over union recognition will arise. Whether there is an agreement, bargaining or negotiation will take place. A compromise agreement may be reached. When this is not possible, the sides can go to arbitration and bring in a third party from outside to say what they think should happen.
However, sometimes one of the sides decides to take industrial action. The management can lock out the employees and prevent them from coming to work. This used to be quite common, but it's rarely used today. The main courses of action open to a trade union are strike, a ban on working overtime, “working to rule”, that is when employees work according to the company rule book, "go slows", which means that employees may spend more time doing the same job, and “picketing”, which means the employees stand outside the entrance to the business location, hoarding outside to show that they are in conflict with the management. Every country has its own tradition of industrial relations, so it’s difficult to generalize. In some businesses, unions are not welcomed by the management, but it others, the unions play an important role both in the everyday working relations of individual companies, and also in the social and political life of the country.
SECTION B INTERVIEW
If you are going to create a TV show that plays week after week, it needs an actor who can play a believer, you know, a person who tends to believe everything. Tonight in our show we have David Duchovney, who has starred in the popular TV series, “The X·Files”. Thanks to his brilliant performance in the TV series, David has become one of best-known figures in the country.
Interviewer: Good evening, David, I’m so glad to have you here.
David: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me on the show.
Interviewer: David, have you often been on the radio shows?
David: Oh, yes, quite often. To be frank, I love to be on the show.
Interviewer: Why?
David: You know, I want to know what people think about the TV series and about me, my acting, etc.
Interviewer: OK, David, let’s first talk about the character you played in ‘The X·Files’. The character, whose name is Mulder is supposed to be a believer. He deals with those unbelievable, wild and often disastrous events. He must be, I mean, Mulder, someone who really believes in the things he meets in order to keep on probing into those mysteries.
David: That’s true. Remember those words said by Mulder: What is so hard to believe? Whose intensity makes even a most skeptical viewer believe the paranormal and our rigorous government consipiracies, without every reason to believe that life in the persistent survey is driving us out of our territorial sphere, etc., etc.
Interviewer: I believe, I guess, David, your contribution to the hot series is quite aparent. Now let’s talk about your personal experience. From what I have read, I know that starting from your childhood, you were always a smart boy, went to the best private school, and were accepted at most of the Ivy League colleges. Not bad for a low middle class kid from a broken family on New York’s Lower Eastside. It’s even more surprising when you, who were on your way to a doctorate at Yale to took a few acting classes and got beaten by the book.
David: You bet. My mother was really surprised when I decided to give up all that in order to become an actor.
Interviewer: Sure. But talking about Mulder, the believer in ‘The X·Files’, what about you, David? Do you believe at all in real life, the aliens, people from outer space, you know, UFOs, government conspiracies, all the things that the TV series deal with?
David: Well, government conspiracies, I think, are a little far fetched. Because I mean, it’s very hard for me to keep a secret with a friend of mine. And you can tell me that the entire government is going to come together and hide the aliens from us? I find that hard to believe. In terms of aliens, I think that they are real. They must be.
Interviewer: So you could believe in aliens?
David: Oh, yeah.
Interviewer: The character you played in ‘The X·Files’, Fox Mulder, is so dark and moody. Are you dark and moody in life?
David: I think so. I think what they wanted was somebody who could be this hearted, driven person, but not behave that way and therefore be hearted and driven but also appear to be normal and not crazy at the same time. And I think that I could, I can, I can afford that.
Interviewer: What haunts you now? What drives you now?
David: What drives me is failure and success and all those things, so ... ?
Interviewer: Where are you now? Are you haunted and driven, failed or successful, which?
David: Yeah, both.
Interviewer: All of the above?
David: I always feel like a failure.
Interviewer: Do you mean now you feel like a failure?
David: Yeah, I mean, sometimes you know, like I come back to New York, so its like, everything is different. So I lie on bed and think, two years ago, three years ago, very different. Maybe I’m doing well, but then I think, you know there are just so many other things that I want to do and ...
Interviewer: Your father and mother divorced when you were eleven. Does that have effect on your life today that you recognize?
David: Well, yeah, I think that the only way to think of it is that, you know, people are saying ‘your wound is your goal’, you know, 'wherever you're hurt, that's where you'll become stronger.’So, that’s what, that’s what it’s really about ...
Interviewer: OK. It’s time for short break. We’ll be back in a minute. David Duchovney in 'The X·file', don't go away.
SECTION C NEWS BROADCAST
News Item 1(For Question 11)
The Bush administration is warning that continuing mid-east violence threatens to overwhelm US efforts to revise Israeli-Palestinian Peace talks, using the recommendations of the Mitchell commission to bring the two sides together. The administration officials are openly worried the violence and particularly the car bomb attack injured Isreali civilians could undermine what they see as a positive opening towards renewed peace talks presented by the Mitchell report. The US appeal came in the week of the bomb blast Wednesday in Israeli coastal town of Netanya that injured several Israelies. Responsibility for the bombing was claimed by the Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad. At the state department, sopkesman, Phillip Reeker said there can be no justification for terrorism and targeting its civilians, and he urged the Palestinian authority to do all they can to put an end to such incidents which is said to threaten to overtake the latest peace efforts.
News Item 2 (For Question 12)
Voters in Peru head to the post today to cast their ballots in a run-off presidential election that many hope will mark the end of the nation’s political crisis. Opinion polls last week show the modern candidate Arhumdred Toledo with a narrow lead over a left-leaning former President Ellen Gaceya. Both candidates have campaigned on similar populous platforms. Meanwhile pre-election Service indicates that up to 25% of voters in Peru plan to spoil or leave their ballots blank to show their dissatisfaction with both candidates.
News Item 3 (For Questions 13-15)
Canada for the seventh consecutive year ranks the best place to live in the world. But if you are a woman, you are better off in Scandinavia since the UN Human Development Report (2000) released yesterday. Norway is in second place you know for ranking followed by the United States, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands Japan and Britain. Finland is in eleventh place followed by France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg, Ireland, Italy and New Zealand. At the other end of the scale, the ten least developed countries that provide the fewest service to their people, from the bottom up, a war-devastated Sierra Leone, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Brandi, Guinean Bissau, Mozambique, Chad, Central African Republic and Mali.
SECTION D NOTE-TAKING AND GAP-FILLING
Good morning, everybody. Today’s lecture is about Abraham Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. This seems like a physiological topic. Actually it is something psychological. Abraham Maslov is a psychologist, and he is especially known for his theory of human needs.
OK, first of all, what is the need? Here, we can simply define it as a personal requirement. Maslov believes that humans are wanting beings, who seek to fulfil a variety of needs. According to his theory, these needs can be arranged in an order according to their importance. It is this order that has become known as Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. In this hierarchy of needs, at the most basic level are physiological needs. Fundamentally, humans are just one species of animal. We need to keep ourselves alive. Physiological needs are what we require for survival. These needs include food and water, shelter and sleep. At this level for us humans, Maslov also includes the need for clothing. How are these needs usually satisfied? It is mainly through adequate wages.
Then what is the next level of needs? At the next level are safety needs, the things we require for physical and emotional security. Physical security is easy to understand. Everybody needs to keep his body safe from injury, illness, etc. Then what is emotional security? Well, that may be the point in this hierarchy of needs, where humans begin to differ from other animals. We are thinking animals. We have worries, what we fear may be losing a job, or being struck down by a severe disease. Besides physical Security, we need to think we are safe from misfortunes both now and in a forseeable future. How can these needs be met then? According to Maslov, safety needs may be satisfied through job security, health insurance, pension plans and safe working conditions.
After this stage come the levels of needs that are particular to human beings. The immediate following level are the social needs. Under this category, Maslov puts our requirements for love and affection and the sense of belonging. We need to be loved, we need to belong to a group not just the family in which we can share with others in common interest. In Maslov’s view, this need can be satisfied through the work environment and some informal organizations. Certainly, we also need social relationships beyond the work place, for example, with family and friends. Next, the level of esteem needs. What are esteem needs then? They include both the needs of self-esteem and the need of esteem of others. Self-esteem is a sense of our own achievements and worth. We need to believe that we are successful, we are no worse if no better than others. The esteem of people is the respect and recognition we gain from other people, by or through our work or our activities in other social groups. The ways to satisfy esteem needs include personal achievements, promotion to more resposible jobs, various honors and awards and other forms of recognition.
What follows is the top level of this hierarchy of needs. These are the self-realization needs. In other words, they are the needs to grow and develop as people, the needs to become all that we are capable of being. These are the most difficult needs to satisfy. Whether one can achieve this level or not, perhaps determines whether one can be a great man or just an ordinary man. Of course, it depends on different people. The means of satisfying them tend to vary greatly with the individual. For some people, learning a new skill, starting a new career after retirement could quite well satisfy their self-realization needs. While for other people, it could be becoming the best in certain areas. It could be becoming the president of IBM, anyway, being great or ordinary is what others think, while self-realization is largely individual. Maslov suggested that people work to satisfy their physiological needs first, then their safety needs and so on up the needs ladder. In general, they are motivated by the needs at the lowest level that remain unsatisfied. However, needs at one level do not have to be completely satisfied before needs at the next higher level come into play. If the majority of a person’s physiological and safety needs are satisfied, that person will be motivated primarily by social needs. But any physiological and safety needs that remain Unsatisfied will keep playing an important role.
OK, that’s the general picture of Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. Just to sum up, I briefly introduce to you Maslov’s theory. Maslov thinks there are five kinds of human needs with each one being more important than the preceding one. I hope that you find his ideas interesting and in our next lecture, we will mainly discuss the practical implications of his theory.
Now, you have 2 minutes to check your notes, then please complete the 15-minute gap-filling task on Answer Sheet One.
This is the end of Part One.
