2018年12月大学英语六级听力讲座原文及解析

2018年12月大学英语六级听力讲座原文及解析

　　Recording One

　　TodayI'm going to talk about a very special kind of person. Psychologists call themmasters of deception. Those rare individuals with a natural ability to tellwith complete confidence, when someone is telling a lie. (16) For decades, researchers and lawenforcement agencies have tried to build a machine that will do the same thing.Now, a company in Massachusetts says that by using magnetic brain scans,they can determine with 97% accuracy whether someone is telling the truth.

　　Theyhope that the technology will be cleared for use in American courts by earlynext year. (17)But is this really the ultimate tool for you? The lawyers oftomorrow? You will not find many brain scientists celebrating thisbreakthrough. The company might be very optimistic, but the ability of theirmachine to detect deception has not provided credible proof. That'sbecause the technology has not been properly tested in real world situations. Inlife, there are different kinds of lies and diverse contexts in which they'retold. These differences may elicit different brain responses.

　　Doestheir hypothesis behind the test apply in every case? We don't know the answer,because studies done on how reliable this machine is have not yet beenduplicated. Much more research is badly needed. Whether the technology iseventually deemed reliable enough for the courts will ultimately be decided bythe judges. Let's hope they're wise enough not to be fooled by a machine thatclaims to determine truthfulness at the flip of a switch. They should also beskeptical of the growing tendency to try to reduce all human traits and actionsto the level of brain activity. Often,they do not map that easily.

　　Moreover,understanding the brain is not the same as understanding the mind. Someresearchers have suggested that thoughts cannot properly be seen as purelyinternal. Instead, thoughts make sense only in reference to the individualsexternal world. So while there may be insights to be gained from matchingbehavior to brain activity, those insights will not necessarily lead to justicein a court of law. Problems surround the use of machines to spot deception, atleast until it has been rigorously tested. (18)A high tech test that can tell when aperson is not telling the truth. Sounds too good to be true. And when somethingsounds too good to be true, it usually is.

　　Question 16. What haveresearchers and law enforcement agencies tried to do?

　　Questions17. How do manybrain scientists respond to the Massachusetts companies so called technologicalbreakthrough?

　　Question 18. What does thespeaker think of using a high tech test to determine whether a person istelling the truth?

　　讲座1解析

　　如同上课时我们讲到的，讲座题一定要听好开头，开头往往揭示主题。本篇开头即提到一类人，mastersof deception。对于生僻名词必然给出解释: Those rare individuals witha natural ability to tell with complete confidence, when someone is telling alie.

　　当我们听到But is this really the ultimate toolfor you? The lawyers of tomorrow? You will not find many brain scientistscelebrating this breakthrough. 时，我们得知很多科学家持反对意见。

　　我们在设问后的问题之处得知but之后便是17题的答案，has not provided credible proof.

　　本篇难点在于16,17题离得比较近，符合我们所讲的连续出题原则，考生须在确定一题答案后马上开始对下一题的判断。后面大段不出题，知道最后给出最后一题的答案。

　　18题作者对于使用高科技仪器测谎的想法是too good tobe true，所以需要选择和负面色彩相关的选项。

　　Recording Two

　　Lastweek, I attended a research workshop on an island in the South Pacific. Thirtypeople were present, and all except me came from the island called Mcclure inthe nation of Vanuatu. Theylive in sixteen different communities and speak sixteen distinct languages. Inmany cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts ofthe next community. (19)Yet the residents of each village speak acompletely different language. According to recent work by my colleaguesat the Max Plank Institute for the science of human history, this island, justone hundred kilometers long and twenty kilometers wide, is home to speakers ofperhaps forty different indigenous languages. (20)Why so many? We could ask the samequestion of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language or evena handful. Instead, today, our species collectively speaks over seven thousanddistinct languages, and these languages are not spread randomly across theplanet. For example, far more languages are found intropical regions that in the milestones. the tropical island of new guinea ishome to over nine hundred languages, Russia, twenty times larger, has 105indigenous languages.

　　Evenwithin the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the twohundred and fifty thousand people who live on Vanuatu’s eighty islands speak110 different languages. But in Bangladesh, a population six hundred timesgreater speaks only 41 languages. How come humans speak so many languages? Andwhy are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have fewclear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguingquestions. They hypothesized that language diversity must be about history,cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations.

　　Butwhen our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eightdifferent countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only adozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed onlanguage diversity in the Pacific. These prior efforts all examine the degreeto which different environmental, social, and geographic variables correlatedwith a number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lotfrom one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged. The studies also ranup against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on theold statistical saying, “Correlation does not equal causation”.

　　Question19. What does thespeaker say about the island of Mcclure?

　　Question 20. What do welearn from the talk about languages in the world?

　　(缺21题)

　　讲座2解析

　　本篇听好开头an island in the South Pacific，即知道内容说的和岛屿相关，当听到the island called Mcclure in the nation of Vanuatu，便需认真听后面的内容，They live in sixteen different communities and speak sixteendistinct languages. 知道本文确切内容为语言。

　　19题为转折后出题：the residents of eachvillage speak a completely different language。

　　20题符合问句后出题。答案为转折处instead之后的内容： today, our species collectively speaks over seven thousand distinctlanguages, and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.