Track 1
    Narrator: Listen to a conversation between a student and a professor.    Student: Hi, Professor Mason. Do you have a minute?    Professor: Yes, of course, Eric. I think there was something I wanted to talk to you about, too.    Student: Probably my late essay.    Professor: Ah, that must have been it. I thought maybe I’d lost it …    Student: No, I’m sorry. Actually, it was my computer that lost it, the first draft of it, and … Well, anyway, I finally put it in your mailbox yesterday.    Professor: Oh, and I haven’t checked the mailbox yet today. Well, I’m glad it’s there … I’ll read it this weekend.    Student: Well, sorry again. Say, I can send it to you by e-mail too, if you like.    Professor: Great, I’ll be interested to see how it all came out.    Student: Right. Now, uh, I just overheard some graduate students talking … something about a party for Dean Adams?    Professor: Retirement party, yes … all students are invited. Wasn’t there a notice on the anthropology department’s bulletin board?    Student: Uh, I don’t know. But … I wanted to offer to help out with it. You know, whatever you need. Dean Adams, well, I took a few anthropology classes with her, and they were great. Inspiring. And, well, I just wanted to pitch in.    Professor: Oh, that’s very thoughtful of you, Eric, but it’ll be pretty low-key. Nothing flashy. That’s not her style.    Student: So there’s nothing?    Professor: No, we’ll have coffee and cookies, … maybe a cake. But actually, a couple of the administrative assistants are working on that. You could ask them, but I think they’ve got it covered.    Student: OK.    Professor: Actually … no, never mind …     Student: What is it?    Professor: Well … It’s nothing to do with the party, and I’m sure there are more exciting ways you could spend your time, but we do need some help with something. We’re compiling a database of articles the anthropology faculty has published. There’s not much glory in it, but we’re looking for someone with some knowledge of anthropology who can enter the articles … I hesitate to mention it, but I don’t suppose this is something you would …    Student: No, that sounds kinda cool. I’d like to see what they’re writing about.    Professor: Wonderful … and there are also some unpublished studies. Did you know Dean Adams did a lot of field research in Indonesia? Most of it hasn’t been published yet.    Student: No, like what?    Professor: Well, she’s really versatile. She just spent several months studying social interactions in Indonesia, and she’s been influential in ethnology. Oh, and she’s also done work in South America that’s closer to biology—especially with speciation.    Student: Uh, not to seem uninformed …    Professor: Well, how species form … you know, how two distinct species form from one— like when populations of the same species are isolated from each other and then develop in two different directions, and end up as two distinct species.     Student: Interesting.    Professor: Yes, and while she was there in South America, she collected a lot of linguisticinformation, and songs … really fascinating.    Student: Well, I hate to see her leave.    Professor: Don’t worry. She’ll still be around. She’s got lots of projects that she’s still in the middle of.
Track 3
    Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in an anthropology class.    Professor: So we’ve been discussing sixteenth century Native American life, and today we’re going to focus on Iroquois and Huron peoples. Um, they lived in the northeastern Great Lakes region of North America. Now, uh, back then their lives depended on the natural resources of the forest, especially the birch tree. The birch tree can grow in many different types of soils and is prevalent in that area. Now, um, can anyone here describe a birch tree?    Male student: Umm, they’re tall? And … white? The bark, I mean.    Professor: Yes, the birch tree has white bark. And this tough protective outer layer of the tree,this, this white bark, is waterproof, and this waterproof quality of the bark, oh, it made it useful for making things like cooking containers, um … a-a variety of utensils. And … i-if you peel birch bark in the winter –– eh, we call it the “winter bark” –– um, another layer, a tougher inner layer of thetree adheres to the bark, producing a stronger material … so the “winter bark” was used for larger utensils and containers.    Male student: Umm, I know people make utensils out of wood, but … utensils out of tree bark?    Professor: Well, birch bark is pliable and very easy to bend. The Native Americans would cutthe bark and fold it into any shape they needed, then secure it with cords until it dried. They could fold the bark into many shapes.     Female student: So, if they cooked in bowls made of birch bark, wouldn’t that make the food taste funny?     Professor: Oh, that’s one of the great things about birch bark. The taste of the birch tree doesn’t get transferred to the food—so it was perfect for cooking containers. Uh, but the most use of the bark was the canoe. Since the northeast region of North America is, uh, it’s interconnected by many streams and waterways, water transportation by vessels like a canoe was most essential. The paths through the woods were often overgrown, so, so water travel was much faster. And here’s what the Native Americans did … they would peel large sheets of bark from the tree to form lightweight yet sturdy canoes. The bark was stretched over frames made from tree branches, uh, stitched together and sealed with resin—you know that, that sticky liquid that comes out of the tree—and when it dries, it’s watertight. One great thing about these birch bark canoes was, uh, they could carry a large amount of cargo. For example, a canoe weighing about 50 pounds could carry up to 9 people and 250 pounds of cargo.     Female student: Wow! But … how far could they travel that way?    Professor: Well, like I said, the northeastern region is, uh, interconnected by rivers and streams, and, uh, the ocean at the coast. The canoes allowed them to travel over a vast area that-that today would take a few hours to fly over. You see, the Native Americans made canoes of all types, for travel on small streams or on large open ocean waters. For small streams they made narrow, maneuverable boats, while, while larger canoes were needed for the ocean. They could travelthroughout the area, only occasionally having to portage, um to, to, carry the canoe over land a short distance, eh, to another nearby stream. And since the canoes were so light … this wasn’t a difficult task. Now, how do you think this affected their lives?    Female student: Well, if they could travel so easily over such a large area, they could trade withpeople from other areas … which I guess, would … lead them to form alliances?    Professor: Exactly. Having an efficient means of transportation, well, that helped the Iroquois to form a federation, linked by natural waterways, and this federation expanded from, uh, what is now southern Canada all the way south to the Delaware River. And, eh, this efficiency of the birch bark canoe also made an impression on newcomers to the area. French traders in the seventeenthcentury modeled their … eh, well they adopted the design of the Iroquois birch bark canoes and they found that they could travel great distances—more than 1500 kilometers a month. Now, besides the bark, Native Americans also used the wood of the birch tree. Eh, the young trees were used as supports for lodgings, with the waterproof bark used as roofing. Um, branches were folded into snowshoes, and the Native American people were all adept at running … running very fast over the snow in these, uh, these birch branch snowshoes, which, if you’ve ever tried walking in snowshoes, you know isn’t easy.
Track 6
    Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in an animal behavior class.    Professor: OK, well, last time we talked about passive habitat selection. Like plants, for example— they don’t make active choices about where to grow—they’re dispersed by some other agent, like the wind. And if the seeds land in a suitable habitat, they do well and reproduce. With active habitat selection, an organism is able to physically select where to live and breed, and because an animal’s breeding habitat is so important, we’d expect animal species to have developed preferences for particular types of habitats, places where their offspring have the best chance of survival. So let’s look at the effect these preferences can have by looking at some examples. But first let’s recap. What do we mean by “habitat?” Frank?        Male student: Well, it’s basically the place or environment where an organism normally lives andgrows.    Professor: Right. And as we’ve discussed, there’re some key elements that a habitat must contain: food, obviously. Water; and it’s got to have the right climate; and spaces for physical protection. And we saw how important habitat selection is when we looked at habitats where some of these factors are removed, perhaps through habitat destruction. Um, I just read about a shorebird, the plover.     The plover lives by the ocean and feeds on small shellfish, insects, and plants. It blends in with the sand, so it’s well camouflaged from predator birds above. But it lays its eggs in shallow depressions in the sand, with very little protection around them. So if there’re people or dogs on the beach, the eggs and fledglings in the nests are really vulnerable. Out in California, where there’s been a lot of human development by the ocean, the plovers are now a threatened species.So conservationists tried to create a new habitat for them. They made artificial beaches and sandbars in areas inaccessible to people and dogs. And the plover population is up quite a bit in those places.    OK, that’s an instance where a habitat is made less suitable. But now what about cases where an animal exhibits a clear choice between two suitable habitats—in cases like that, does the preference matter? Well, let’s look at the blue warbler.    The blue warbler is a songbird that lives in North America. They clearly prefer hardwood forests with dense shrubs—um, bushes—underneath the trees. They actually nest in the shrubs, not the trees, so they’re pretty close to the ground, but these warblers also nest in forests that have low shrub density. It’s usually the younger warblers that nest in these areas because the preferred spots where there are a lot of shrubs are taken by the older, more dominant birds.    And the choice of habitat seems to affect reproductive success. Because the older, more experienced birds, who nest in the high-density shrub areas, have significantly more offspring than those in low-density areas. Which suggests that the choice of where to nest does have an impact on the number of chicks they have. But a preferred environment doesn’t always seem to correlate with greater reproductive success. For example, in Europe, studies have been done of blackcap warblers—we just call them blackcaps.    The blackcap can be found in two different environments. Ah, their preferred habitat is forests near the edges of streams. However, blackcaps also live in pine woods away from water. Studies’ve been done on the reproductive success rates for the birds in both areas and the results showed—surprisingly— that the reproductive success was essentially the same in both areas—thepreferred and the second choice habitat. Well, why?    It turned out that there were actually four times as many bird pairs, or couples, living in the stream-edge habitat compared to the area away from the stream. So the stream-edge area had a much denser population, which meant more members of the same species competing for resources—wanting to feed on the same things or build their nests in the same places, which lowered the suitability of the prime habitat even though it’s their preferred habitat. So the results of the studies suggest that when the number of competitors in the prime habitat reaches a certain point, the second-ranked habitat becomes just as successful as the prime habitat, just because there are fewer members of the same species living there. So it looks like competition for resources is another important factor in determining if a particular habitat is suitable.
Track 10
    Narrator: Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic in a psychology class.    Professor: This happens all the time with kids, in schools. Say there’s a little boy or girl who’sjust starting school. Well, they’re not really used to the rules about proper behavior for a classroom, so at the beginning, they might, I don’t know, interrupt the teacher, walk around the classroom when they’re supposed to be sitting down. You know, just misbehaving in general. OK, but what happens? Well, the teacher gets angry with them when they act this way. They might get punished—they have to sit at their desks when everyone else is allowed to go outside and play. And they certainly don’t like that. Soon they’ll learn that this kind of behavior gets them in trouble.They’ll also learn that when they raise their hand to talk to the teacher, and sit quietly and pay attention during class … they’re rewarded. The teacher tells them she’s proud of them, and maybe puts little happy-face stickers on their homework. Now that their behavior gets a good reaction from the teacher, the kids learn to always act this way in class … and not behave the way they used to.     Narrator: Using the example from the lecture, explain what behavior modification is and howit works.
Track 11
    Narrator: Listen to a conversation between two students.    Female student: Hey Steve, are you ready for classes to start?    Male student: Not really. There’s still a big conflict in my course schedule.    Female student: What’s wrong?    Male student: This is my last semester, and I’ve still got two required courses left to take in orderto finish my literature degree.    Female student: OK …    Male student: I have to take both History of the Novel and Shakespeare, or I can’t graduate. Problem is, the two courses meet at the same time!    Female student: Uh-oh. What’re you gonna do?    Male student: Well, I talked to the professor who’s gonna teach Shakespeare. He said I could doan independent study to fulfill that requirement.    Female student: How would that work?    Male student: I’d read the assigned texts on my own, do all the same assignments, and meet with him when I need to, if I have any questions.    Female student: Well, that sounds like a good way to fulfill the requirement.    Male student: Yeah, plus it’d be nice to have one-on-one discussions with the professor. It’s justthat … well, working on my own like that … I’m kinda concerned I won’t be able to motivate myself to get the work done on time. It’s easy to put things off when it’s not an actual class, ya know?    Female student: Yeah. Are there other options?    Male student: Um, yeah. I found out that the Shakespeare class is being offered at another university about a half an hour from here. That university has a really great literature program, and our university will accept their credits, so …     Female student: That’s an idea.    Male student: Yeah, I’m sure it’d be a good class, and it’d fulfill the requirement. Only thing is, ya know, I’d have to drive a half an hour to get to the class and a half an hour to come back. Three times a week. That’s a lot of time and gas money …    Narrator: Briefly summarize the problem the speakers are discussing. Then state which solution you would recommend. Explain the reasons for your recommendation.