专四专八 | 专八2018年真题听力 - TEM8-mini-lecture（2018）

为帮助大家高效备考，我们近期将在专四考前不定期推出针对专四听写适应性练习，敬请收听；限于平台每日推送图文条数限制，当期同一图文内同步推送专四词汇、写作等其它相关资讯，供大家学习参考使用。

• 专四听写训练

建议应试步骤：

考生可按照听前预测、听中记录、听后检查三个步骤来完成听写，考生要尝试将每一部分有机结合到一起。

1. 听前预测：考生在听录音前对录音原文的内容和词汇进行预测。由于试卷已经给出所听写文章标题，因而考生可以根据原文的标题，再结合平时积累的文化常识，大致判断出原文的主题、内容和可能会出现的词汇。

2. 听中记录：考生在听写的过程中要注意合理安排，熟练掌握速记方法。合理安排指的是考生听写每一遍录音时，侧重点应有所不同。

第一遍：第一遍录音是匀速朗读，意群之间没有停顿，因而，建议考生在听这一遍时以听懂大意为主，速记个别实词(主要是动词和名词)为辅。

第二遍：在第二遍录音中，每个意群后录音会停顿15秒，这时考生就要结合第一遍听到的大意，尽量逐字逐句写出每个意群的内容。根据听力信息处理和输出的特点，建议考生将听写的侧重点放在每个意群的首尾部分，因为这是考生最能听清且短时间内记得最清楚的部分。

第三遍：第三遍录音与第二遍的朗读模式一致，考生在听这一遍录音时应重点关注句子中间的实词和结构性的虚词，即关注第二遍没有关注的所有细节。在听完这一遍后，考生应该把文章的每个意群都基本写下来了，同时对文章的内容细节基本清晰。

第四遍：第四遍录音与第一遍的朗读模式一致，考生在听这一遍录音时，应将重点放在查缺补漏上。对于前三遍还没听写出来的部分，考生要在听这一遍录音时，结合语义、语感进行补充。

3. 听后检查：考生在听完四遍录音后，有两分钟的时间用于检查听写的内容。考生应充分利用这两分钟，通读自己写的全文，查找语法、语义和单词拼写错误，并根据逻辑对明显错误之处进行必要的更正。

Language and humanity 

Good morning, everyone! In today’s lecture, we are going to discuss the relationship between language and humanity. As we all know, language is very powerful and allows you to put a thought from your mind directly into someone else's mind.

Languages are genes talking, getting things that they want. And you just imagine the sense of wonder in a baby when it first discovers that, merely by uttering a sound, it can get objects to move across a room as if by magic, and maybe even into its mouth.

Now. we need to explain how and why this remarkable trait, you know, human’s ability to do things with language has evolved, and why did this trait evolve only in our species? In order to get an answer to the question, we have to go to tool use in the chimpanzees. Chimpanzees can use tools, and we take that phenomenon as a sign of their intelligence.

But if they really were intelligent, why would they crack open nuts with a rock? Why wouldn't they just go to a shop and buy a bag of nuts that somebody else had already cracked open for them? Why not? I mean, that's what we do.

The  reason  the  chimpanzees  don't  do  that  is  that  they  lack  what  psychologists  and anthropologists call social learning. That is, they seem to lack the ability to learn from others by copying or imitating or simply watching. As a result, they can't improve on others' ideas, learn from others' mistakes, or even benefit from others' wisdom. And so they just do the same thing over and over and over again. In fact, we could go away for a million years and come back and these chimpanzees would be doing the same thing with the same rocks to crack open the nuts.

Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old saying, "monkey see, monkey do," the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that -- at least not very much. But by comparison, we humans can learn. We can learn by watching other people and copying or imitating what they can do. We can then choose, from among a range of options, the best one. We can benefit from others' ideas. We can build on their wisdom. And as a result, our ideas do accumulate, and our technology progresses.

And this cumulative cultural adaptation, as anthropologists call this accumulation of ideas, is responsible for everything around you in your bustling and teeming everyday lives. I mean the world has changed out of all proportion to what we would recognize even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. And all of this because of cumulative cultural adaptation. For instance, the chairs you're sitting in, the lights in this lecture hall, my microphone, the iPads and smartphones that you carry around with you -- all are a result of cumulative cultural adaptation.

But our acquisition of social learning would create an evolutionary dilemma, and the solution to the dilemma, it's fair to say, would determine not only the future course of our psychology, but the future course of the entire world. And most importantly for this, it'll tell us why we have language.

And the reason that dilemma arose is, it turns out, that social learning is visual theft. What I mean is, if I can learn by watching you, I can steal your best ideas, and I can benefit from your efforts, without having to put in the same time and energy that you did into developing them. Social learning really is visual theft. And in any species that acquired it, it would encourage you to hide your best ideas, lest somebody steal them from you.

And so some time around 200,000 years ago, our species confronted this crisis. And we chose was to develop the systems of communication that would allow us to share ideas and to cooperate amongst others. Choosing this option would mean that a vastly greater fund of knowledge and wisdom would become available to any one individual than would ever arise from within an individual family or an individual person on their own. Well, language is the result.

Language evolved to solve the crisis of visual theft. Language is a piece of social technology for enhancing the benefits of cooperation -- for reaching agreements, for striking deals and for coordinating our activities. And you can see that, in a developing society that was beginning to acquire language, not having language would be a like a bird without wings. As I said at the beginning, language really is the voice of our genes.

But, as we spread out around the world, we developed thousands of different languages. Currently, there are about seven or 8,000 different languages spoken on Earth. Then another problem occurred. It seems that we use our language, not just to cooperate, but to draw rings around our cooperative groups and to establish identities, and perhaps to protect our knowledge and wisdom and skills from being stolen from outside. And we know this because when we study different language groups and associate them with their cultures, we see that different languages slow the flow of ideas between groups.

Okay, this tendency we have, this seemingly natural tendency we have, goes towards isolation, towards keeping everything to ourselves. Well, as our modern world is communicating with itself and with each other more than it has at any time in its past. And that communication, that connectivity around the world, that globalization now raises a burden. Because these different languages impose a barrier, as we've just seen, to the transfer of goods and ideas and technologies and wisdom. And they impose a barrier to cooperation.

What will be the solution, in a world in which we want to promote cooperation and exchange, and in a world that might be dependent more than ever before on cooperation to maintain and enhance our levels of prosperity? I think it might be inevitable that we have to confront the idea that our destiny is to be one world with one language. What do you think of this solution?

OK, in today’s lecture, I’ve presented to you how language shapes our humanity, what kind of dilemma social learning created and possible solution to the dilemma. In our next lecture, I am going to talk about lingua franca and its functions. (Now, you have THREE minutes to check your work.)

TEM8-mini-lecture（2018）

评分标准

• 每个空格最多填入 3 个单词，超过 3 个单词的，无论是否正确，均不得分；

• 单词拼写必须正确，拼错不得分；

• 部分答案存在 A and B 或者 A but B 的形式，答对一个只给 0.5 分。

(1) our species/human beings/humans

(2) (their) intelligence

(3) learn/learn from others

(4) repeat doing actions/repeating

(5) wisdom/other’s wisdom

(6) accumulate

(7) evolutionary dilemma

(8) watching and copying/imitating

(9) systems of communication

(10) knowledge and wisdom

(11) benefits of cooperation

(12) establishment of identities

(13) isolation

(14) connectivity/cooperation

(15) These different languages

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