托福听力背景解读.docxVIP

在新托福考试中，听力是听说读写四项里最关键的项目，除了阅读，其他三项都会考察听力能力。因此我们才会说：得听力者得托福。听力基础不好的同学，一定要耐心去做精听练习并配合背诵托福听力的单项词汇。那么听力考试的背景是什么？首先，新托福考试的听力部分分为两个section，如果遇到听力加试，则再多一个section。每个section中，有一段conversation和两段lecture，均要求考生在未知题目的情况下听完，之后再做题，不能复听，答案提交后也不能修改。考试时间总共是50分钟。每个section考17道题，答题时间为10分钟，节奏由自己控制，简单的题速度快一点，拿不准的题可以多花些功夫。平均来讲，大概每道题的答题时间是30秒左右。这与我们以往的英语考试很不相同，尤其是lecture大多会长达5分多钟，如果不是英语基础极好，很难在不做笔记的情况下准确答题。而这些材料，都是模拟美国校园里的对话和课堂讲座，因而对话反应校园生活，而讲座内容具有一定科普性。举例来说，这是一篇TPO中的讲座，主要内容是天文学。Professor：OK, last time we talked about ancient agricultural civilizations that observed the starsand then used those observations to keep track of the seasons. But today I want totalk about the importance of stars for early seafarers, about how the fixed patternsof stars were used as navigational aids.OK, you’ve all heard about the Vikings and their impressive navigation skills, but theseafaring people of the pacific islands, the Polynesians and the Micronesians, werequite possibly the world’s greatest navigators. Long before the development of, uh,advanced navigational tools in Europe, pacific islanders were travelling from NewZealand to Hawaii and back again, using nothing but the stars as their navigationalinstruments.Um, the key to the pacific islanders’ success was probably their location near theequator. What that meant was that the sky could be partitioned, divided up, muchmore symmetrically than it could farther away from the equator. Unlike the Vikings,early observers of the stars in Polynesia or really anywhere along the equator wouldfeel that they were at the very center of things, with the skies to the north and theskies to the south behaving identically, they could see stars going straight up in theeast and straight down in the west. So it was easier to discern the order in the sky than farther north or farther south, where everything would seem more chaotic.Take the case of the Gilbert Islands, they are part of Polynesia, and lie very close tothe equator. And the people there were able to divide the sk