2015年10月31日托福口语真题及答案解析（新东方）

　　Task 1

　　What activity do you think can cultivate children's sense of responsibility?

　　I think for children to cultivate their sense of responsibility, nothing's better than giving them them a pet. I've got two reasons. First of all, having a pet makes children realize the importance of taking care of others. Take myself as an example, my parents gave me a puppy as my birthday gift when I turned 8 and it was a big responsbility to me. All of a sudden I had something in my life I had to take care of, my dad helped me make a list of all of the things I needed to do. I had to feed him everyday, gave him a shower every week, and walked him every Saturday morning, I even had to take him to the vet when he was sick. All those things made me realize that none of us were alone in this world and taking care of others is as important as taking care of ourselves. Plus, having a pet makes children realize the importance of persistence. After I got my puppy, I learnt that doing nice things for him for one day was easy, what was not easy was doing the same things for him over and over again, and I managed to do it for nearly 14 years. I guess having a pet finally made me understand that taking care of others is easy, but it's constantly taking care of others that really counts.

　　Task 2

　　Do you prefer listening to music or doing nothing when you go from a place to another?

　　I personally prefer listening to music on my way to places for two reasons. First of all, music makes my journey much more enjoyable. For instance, I like to pick out songs I listen to according to my mood and the places I'm going to. Like last weekend, I was invited to my cousin's wedding, on the way to the wedding, I was listening to A Thousand Years, the theme song of the movie Twilight, the music and lyrics are about true and undying love of the characters in the movie so it completely matched the ocassion and I would even say that the music made the wedding even more touching and moving to me. Plus, I simply love listening to music, unfortunately now with the exams and papers going on, I don't get to have a lot of time just for music. So I seize every opportunity to listen to some good songs, nothing seems to be a better chance of enjoying good music than when I travel to places.My ears are fully open just to music and I get to have my own space. It's like the only time of day I can truly appreciate music.

　　Task 3

　　The student suggests that the university should allow students to borrow bikes for free due to two reasons. The first reason is to reduce the amount of traffic. And the second reason is to offer students an opportunity to work out. In the conversation, the man agrees with the suggestion. In the first reason, he mentions that the campus is pretty big and a lot of students are driving around campus now, if students got to borrow bikes for free, then more students would choose to ride bikes instead thus reducing the ammount of traffic. As for the second reason, the man points out that most of students don't have time to do exercise, so if the university allowed students to borrow bikes for free, maybe more students would get the opportunity of working out a little every day.

　　Task 4

　　In the lecture, the professor talks about tolerant ecotype which are the species that can evolve in or adapt to harsh environment. He offers us an example to illustrate it. The companion plant that was planted in an area with metal contamination, it couldn't survive at first, but over time, the plant developed the ability to tolerate this kind of environment and adapted to it. Not only the plant itself, the researchers found out that the seeds of this plant from this metal contaminated area can also grow and survive in the harsh environment. But if you moved a companion plant from a regular environment to this harsh environment, there would be no way they could grow or survive. That's how the professor uses the example of the companion plant to illustrate the concept of tolerant ecotype.

　　Task 5

　　The woman's problem is that one of her roommates moved out and she's supposed to interview the applicants for the room with another of her rommates tonight, but she can't go because she's got a geology group meeting at the same time. There are two possible solutions for her. The first one is to drop out of the meeting and the second one is to go to the meeting and trust her other roommate. If I were in her shoes, I would go for the second solution because her geology group meeting sounds really important, they may talk about things related to exams and stuff, things she would definitely miss out on if she simply read some materials herself. After all, a discussion with her peers will cover so much more than printed materials. I personally don't recommend the other solution, because her roommate probably will do a great job without her anyway, it's not worth it to miss out on a great geology group meeting just for this.

　　Task 6

　　In the lecture, the professor talks about the drawbacks of standardization of employees. He offers us two examples to illustrate it. The first drawback of standardization is that it will discourage the creativity of employees. For example, there's a store that sells clothes, they encourage employees to come up with their own jokes to attract customers to purchase their products. But after they started using standardized scripts for all employees, the effect was not very good, since employees couldn't create as they did in the past, the sales declined as well. The second drawback is the additional cost, coming up a whole standardized procedure for employees require time and energy from both the managers and the employees and the company can't expect them to do it for free, so paying the managers and employees to come up with the standardized procedure can be additional cost to the company.