Track 1
    Narrator: Listen to a conversation between a student and a registrar.    Student: Hi, I’d like to drop off my graduation form. I understand you need this in order to process my diploma.    Registrar: OK, I’ll take that. Uh, before you leave, lemme check our computer … Uh, looks likeyou’re OK for graduation and … hmmmm. Actually, I’m getting a warning flag on your academic record here.    Student: Really?    Registrar: Yeah, let’s see what’s what. Uh, OK, are you familiar with our graduation requirements?    Student: Um, I think so.    Registrar: Then you know you need forty-eight credits in your major field to graduate, and at least twenty-four credits at the intermediate level or higher. Also, after your second year, you have to meet with your department chair to outline a plan for the rest of your time here. In the past, we also issued letters before a student’s final year began to let them know what they needed to take in their final year to be OK. But we don’t do that anymore …    Student: I-I definitely met with my chairperson two years ago. Uh, he told me that I needed eight more courses at the intermediate level or higher in the last two years to be OK… so I’m not sure what the problem is. I made sure I got those credits.    Registrar: Unfortunately, the computer’s usually pretty reliable … so I’m not sure what’s going on here.    Student: It could be that I’ve taken two basic courses but coupled both of them with field experiences.    Registrar: What do you mean?    Student: Well, I could only take intro courses because there were no intermediate-level courses available for those particular topics. My chairperson told me that if I did independent field research in addition to the assigned work in each course, they would count as intermediate-level courses. My classmates, um, well, some of my classmates, did this for an easy way to meet the intermediate course requirement. But I did it to get the kind of depth in those topics I was going for. As it turned out, I really enjoyed the fieldwork. It was a nice supplement to just sitting and listening to lectures. Registrar I’m sure that’s true, but the computer’s still showing them as basic-levelcourses, despite the fieldwork.    Student: I’m not sure what to do, then. I mean, should I cancel my graduation party?    Registrar: No! No reason to get worried like that. Just contact your chairperson immediately, OK? Uh, tell him to call me as soon as possible so that we can verify your fieldwork arrangement and certify those credits right away. It’s not like there’s an actual deadline today or anything, but if more than a few weeks go by, we might have a real problem that would be very difficult to fix in time for you to graduate. In fact, there probably would be nothing we could do.    Student: I’ll get on that.
Track 3
    Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class.    Professor: So, that’s how elephants use infra sound … Now let’s talk about the other end of the acoustical spectrum—sound that’s too high for humans to hear: ultra sound. Ultrasound is used by many animals that detect—and, some of them, send out—very high-frequency sounds. So, what’s a good example? Yes, Carol?    Female Student: Well, bats—since they’re all blind, bats have to use sound for—uh, y’know—to keep from flying into things.    Professor: That’s echolocation. Echolocation is pretty self-explanatory: Using echoes—reflected sound waves—to locate things … As Carol said, bats use it for navigation and orientation … and what else? Mike?    Male student: Well, finding food is always important—and, uh, I guess, not becoming food for other animals …    Professor: Right on both counts. Avoiding other predators—and locating prey—uh, typically insects that fly around at night. Now, before I go on, let me just respond to something Carol was saying—this idea that bats are blind … actually, there are some species of bats—the ones that don’t use echolocation—that do rely on their vision for navigation but, it is true that, for many bats, their vision is too weak to count on. OK, so: quick summary of how echolocation works. The bat emits these ultrasonic pulses—very high-pitched sound waves that we can’t hear—and then: they analyze the echoes—how the waves bounce back. Uh, here, let me finish this diagram I started before class …     So the bat sends out these pulses—very focused bursts of sound, and echoesbounce back …     Y’know, I don’t think I need to draw in the echoes. Your-your reading assignment for the next class—it has a diagram that shows this very clearly—so anyway, as I was saying … By analyzing these echoes, the bat can determine, say, if there’s a wall in a cave that it needs to avoid … and—how far away it is. Another thing it uses ultrasound to detect is the size and shape of objects. For example, one echo they’d quickly identify is the one they associate with a moth, which is common prey for a bat— particularly, a moth beating its wings. However, moths happen to have a major advantage over most other insects: they can detect ultrasound. This means that, when a bat approaches, the moth can detect the bat’s presence … so it has time to escape to safety … or else they can just remain motionless—since, um, when they stop beating their wings, they’d be much harder for the bat to distinguish from, oh, a-a leaf … or-or some other object …     Now, we’ve tended to underestimate just how sophisticated the abilities of animals that use ultrasound are. In fact, we kind of assumed that they were filtering a lot out—uh, the way a sophisticated radar system can ignore echoes from stationary objects on the ground. Radar does this to remove “ground clutter”—information about, um, hills or buildings that it doesn’t need … but bats—we thought they were filtering out this kind of information because they simply couldn’t analyze it. But it looks as if we were wrong. Recently, there was this experiment with trees and a specific species of bats—a bat called the lesser spear-nosed bat. Now a tree should be a huge acoustical challenge for a bat, right? I mean, it’s got all kinds of surfaces, with different shapes and angles … So, well, the echoes from a tree are going to be a mass of chaotic acoustic reflections, right? Not like the echo from a moth. So, we thought, for a long time, that bats stopped their evaluation at simply “that’s a tree.” Yet, it turns out that-that bats, or at least this particular species, can not only tell that it’s a tree, but can also distinguish between, say, a pine tree and a deciduous tree—like, a maple, or an oak tree … just by their leaves—an-and when I say “leaves,” I mean pine needles, too. Any ideas on how it would know that?    Male Student: Well … like with the moth—could it be their shape?    Professor: You’re on the right track. It’s actually the echo off all the leaves—as a whole— that matters. Now, think: A pine tree—with all those little, densely packed needles … those produce a large number of faint reflections in what’s called a “smooth” echo—the waveform is very even … but an oak—which has fewer but bigger leaves with stronger reflections—produces a jagged waveform—or what we call a “rough” echo. And these bats can distinguish between the two—andnot just with trees, but with any echo that comes in a smooth or rough shape.
Track 5
    Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a history class.    Professor: So we’ve been talking about the printing press, how it changed people’s lives, making books more accessible to everyone. More books meant more reading, right? But as you know, not everyone has perfect vision. This increase in literacy, in reading, led to an increase in demand for eyeglasses. And here’s something you probably haven’t thought of: This increased demand impacted societal attitudes towards eyeglasses.     But, um, first let me back up a bit and talk about vision correction before the printing press. And what did people with poor vision do—I mean especially those few people who were actually literate—what did they do before glasses were invented? Well, they had different ways of dealing with not seeing well. If you think about it, poor vision wasn’t their only problem. I mean, think about the conditions they lived in: Houses were dark, sometimes there weren’t any windows, candles were the only source of light … So in some places, umm … like ancient Greece, for example, the wealthiest people with poor vision could have someone else read to them. Easy solution if you could afford it.    Another solution was something called a reading stone. Around 1000 c.e., European monks would take a piece of clear rock, often quartz, and place it on top of the reading material. The clear rock magnified the letters, making them appear larger. Umm, it’s like what happens when a drop of water falls on something. Whatever’s below the drop of water appears larger, right? Well, the reading stone works in a similar way.    But rocks like quartz, quartz of optical quality, weren’t cheap. Late in the thirteenth century, glassmakers in Italy came up with a less expensive alternative—they made reading stones out of clear glass. And these clear-glass reading stones evolved into the eyeglasses we know today.    So we’re pretty sure that glasses were invented in about the late 1200s, well over a hundred years before the printing press. But, it’s not clear who exactly invented them first, or exactly what year, but records show that they were invented in both Europe and China at about the same time. By the way, we call this independent discovery.    Independent discovery means when something is invented in different parts of the world at the same time. And it’s not as unusual as it sounds. You can look at the time line charts in the back of your textbook to see when things were invented in different cultures at about the same time … to see what I’m talking about.    So now let’s tie this to what I said before about societal attitudes towards glasses. Initially, in parts of Europe and in China, glasses were a symbol of wisdom and intelligence. This is evident in the artwork from the period. European paintings often portrayed doctors or … or … judges wearing glasses. In China, glasses were very expensive, so in addition to intelligence they also symbolized affluence, wealth. In fourteenth-century Chinese portraits, the bigger the glasses, the smarter and wealthier the subject was. So glasses were a status symbol in some parts of the world.    Now let’s get back to the invention of the printing press in 1440. What happened? Suddenly books became readily available, and more people wanted to read, so the need, well actually, not only the need, but the demand for more affordable glasses rose drastically. Eventually, inexpensive glasses were produced and then glasses were available to everyone. People could purchase them easily from a traveling peddler.
Track 9
    Narrator: Now listen to two students discussing the university’s plan.    Male Student: Did you read this article? Are they serious?    Female Student: Yeah, I think so. Why?    Male Student: Well, first of all, a lot of kids aren’t looking for a relaxing break at lunchtime. They like to study while they eat, especially if they have exams coming up, or some assignment they have to get done.    Female Student: Yeah, that’s true.    Male Student: And now they won’t be able to concentrate. This is gonna be very distracting.    Female Student: Mmm. OK, yeah, I see your point.    Male Student: And second, most students don’t like classical music.    Female Student: It’s certainly not what I listen to.    Male Student: So are people going to stop listening to their own music?    Female Student: No.    Male Student: I think people are going to be even more likely to bring their mp3 player, you know, to play their own music and block out the classical stuff.    Female Student: Yeah, that makes sense.    Narrator: The man expresses his opinion of the university’s plan. State his opinion and explainthe reasons he gives for holding that opinion.
Track 10
    Narrator Listen to part of a lecture in a business class.    Professor: If a consumer has to choose between two products, what determines the choiceAssume that someone, a purchaser, is choosing between two products that cost the same. OK? If people have a choice between two identically priced products, which one will they choose? Theychoose the one they think is of higher quality, of course. But what does it mean for a product to be a high-quality product? Well, business analysts usually speak of two major factors of quality—one factor is reliability, and the other is what we call features.    So, reliability. What’s reliability? Well, a product is reliable if it works the way we expect it to work, if it can go a reasonable amount of time without needing repairs. If a product, a car for example, doesn’t work the way it should and needs repairs too soon, we say it’s unreliable. So product reliability means, basically, the absence of defects or problems that you weren’t expecting. It used to be that when people thought about product quality, they thought mainly about reliability. Today it’s different. People do still care about reliability, don’t get me wrong. It’s just thatmanufacturing standards are now so high that … take cars for example; today, today’s cars all very reliable. So reliability is important, but it’s not gonna be the deciding factor.    So if reliability isn’t the deciding factor any more, what is? Features—all those extras, the things a product has that aren’t really necessary but that make it easier to use or that make it cool: for example, new cars today are loaded with features like electric windows, sun roofs, air conditioning, stereos, and so forth. When people are comparing products today, they look at features—because reliability’s pretty much equal across the board. And that’s why manufacturers include so many features in their products.    Narrator Using points and examples from the lecture, explain the two major factors of product quality and how their role in consumer decision making has changed.
Track 11
    Narrator: Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic you just read about.    Professor: No memoir can possibly be correct in every detail, but still, the Chevalier’s memoiris pretty accurate overall and is, by and large, a reliable historical source. Let’s look at the accuracy of the three episodes mentioned in the reading.    First, the loan from the merchant: Well, that doesn’t mean that the Chevalier was poor. Let me explain. We know that in Switzerland, the Chevalier spent huge amounts of money on parties and on gambling. And he had wealth, but it was the kind of property you have to sell first to get money. So it usually took a few days to convert his assets into actual money. So when he ran out of cash, he had to borrow some while he was waiting for his money to arrive—but that’s not being poor!    Second, the conversations with Voltaire: The Chevalier states in his memoir that each night, immediately after conversing with Voltaire, he wrote down everything he could remember about that particular night’s conversation. Evidently, the Chevalier kept his notes of these conversations for many years and referred to them when writing the memoir. Witnesses who lived with the Chevalier in his later life confirm that he regularly consulted notes and journals when composing the memoir.    Third, the Chevalier’s escape from the prison in Venice: Other prisoners in that prison had even more powerful friends than he did, and none of them were ever able to bribe their way to freedom, so bribery hardly seems likely in his case. The best evidence, though, comes from some old Venetian government documents. They indicate that soon after the Chevalier escaped from the prison, the ceiling of his old prison room had to be repaired. Why would they need to repair a ceiling unless he had escaped exactly as he said he did?