TOEFL IBT Listening Practice Test 29 from Official TOEFL iBT Test with Audio Volume 1 Solution
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TOEFL IBT Listening Practice Test 29 from Official TOEFL iBT Test with Audio Volume 1 Solution Transcripts
TRACK 42 TRANSCRIPT
Narrator
Listen to a conversation between a student and an employee in the university’s career services office.
Student
Hi. Do you have a minute?
Administrator
Sure. How can I help you?
Student
I have a couple of questions about the career fair next week.
Administrator
OK, shoot.
Student
Um, well, are seniors the only ones who can go? I mean, you know they’re finishing school this year and getting their degrees and everything … and, well i, seems ,like businesses would want to talk to them and not first-year students like me …
Administrator
No, no. The career fair is open to all our students and we encourage anyone who’s interested to go check it out.
Student
Well, that’s good to know.
Administrator
You’ve seen the flyers and the posters around campus, I assume.
Student
Sure! Can’t miss ’em. I mean, they all say where and when the fair is … just no, wo should attend.
Administrator
Actually, they do. But it’s in the small print. We should probably make that part easier to read, shouldn’t we? I’ll make a notre of that right now. So, do you have any other questions?
Student
Yes, actually I do now. Um, since I’d only be going to familiarize myself with the process you now, “check it out”—I was wondering if there’s anything you’d recommend that I do to prepare.
Administrator
That’s actually a very good question. As you know, the career fair is generally an opportunity for local businesses to recruit new employees and for soon-to-be gradu-ates to have mterv.ews with several companies they might be interested in working for. Now, in your case, even though you wouldn’t be looking for employment right now, it still wouldn’t hurt for you to prepare much like you would if you were looking for a job.
Student
You mean like get my resume together and wear a suit?
Administrator
That’s a given. I was thinking more along the lines of doing some research. The fivers and posters list all the businesses that are sending representatives to the career fair. Um, what s your major, or do you have one yet?
Student
Well, I haven’t declared a major yet but I’m strongly considering accounting. See, that’s part of the reason I want to go to the fair… to help me decide if that’s what I really want to study …
Administrator
That’s very wise. Well, I suggest that you get on the computer and learn more about the accounting companies, in particular, that will be attending. You can learn a lot about companies from their Internet Web sites. Then prepare a list of questions.
Student
Questions … hmm. So in a way I’ll be interviewing them?
Administrator
That’s one way of looking at it. Think about it for a second. What do you want to know about working for an accounting firm?
Student .
Well, there’s the job itself… and salary, of course … and, urn, working conditions …
I mean, would I have an office or would I work in a big room with a zillion other employees? And … um … and maybe about opportunities for advancement. ..
Administrator
See? Those are all important things to know. After you do some research you II be able to tailor your questions to the particular company you re talking to.
Student
Wow, I’m glad I came by here! So, it looks like I’ve got some work to do. Administrator
And if you plan on attending future career fairs, I recommend you sign up for one of our interview workshops.
Student
I’ll do that.
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TRACK 43 TRANSCRIPT
Narrator
Why does the student say this:
Student
So, it looks like I’ve got some work to do.
TRACK 44 TRANSCRIPT
Narrator
Listen to part of a lecture in an economics class.
Professor
Now, when I mention the terms “boom” and “bust,” whet does that bring to mind?
Male student
The dot-com crash of the ’90s!
Professor
- The boom in the late 1990s when all those new Internet companies sprang up and were then sold for huge amounts of money. Then the bust around 2000 … 2001 when many of those same Internet companies went out of business. Of course booms aren t always followed by busts-we’ve certainly seen times when local economies expanded rapidly for a while then went back to a normal pace of growth. But there’s a type of rapid expansion, what might be called a “hysterical” or irrational boom that pretty much always leads to a bust. See, people often create and intensify a boom when they get carried away by some new industry that seems like it’ll make ’em lots of money, fast. You’d think that by the ’90s, people would’ve learned from the past. If they did—well, look at tulips.
Male student
Tulips …? You mean, like, the flower?
Professor
Exactly. For instance, do you have any idea where tulips are from? Originally, I mean.
Male student
Well, the Netherlands, right?
Professor
That’s what most people think—but no, they’re not native to the Netherlands, or even Europe. Tulips actually hail from an area the Chinese call the “Celestial Mountains” in central Asia—a very remote mountainous region.
It was Turkish nomads who first discovered tulips and spread them slowly westward. Now, around the sixteenth century, Europeans were traveling to Istanbul in Turkey as merchants and diplomats. And the Turks often gave the Europeans tulip bulbs as gifts, which they would carry home with them. For the Europeans, tulips were totally unheard of, a great novelty. The first bulbs to show up in the Netherlands, the merchant who received them roasted and ate them—he thought they were a kind of onion.
It turns out that the Netherlands was an ideal country for growing tulips. It had the right kind of sandy soil, for one thing, but also it was a wealthy nation with a growing economy, willing to spend lots of money on new, exotic things—plus the Dutch had a history of gardening. Wealthy people would compete, spending enormous amounts of money to buy the rarest flowers for their gardens.
Soon tulips were beginning to show up in different colors as growers tried to breed them specifically for colors which would make them even more valuable, but they were never completely sure what they would get. Some of the most prized tulips were white with purple streaks or red with yellow streaks on the petals—even a dark purple tulip that was very much prized. What happened then was a craze for these specialized tulips. We call that craze “tulip mania.”
So—here we’ve got all the conditions for an-an irrational boom: a prospering economy, so more people had more disposable income—money to spend on luxuries—w they weren’t experienced at investing their new wealth. Then along comes a thrilling new commodity—sure, the first specimens were just plain old red tulips but they could be bred into some extraordinary variations-like that dark purple tulip And finally, you have an unregulated marketplace—no government constraints—where prices could explode. And explode they did, starting in the 1630s.
There was always much more demand for tulips than supply. Tulips didn’t bloom fre-quently like roses; tulips bloomed once in the early spring and that was it for the year. Eventually, specially bred, multicolored tulips became so valuable … Well, accordina to records, one tulip bulb was worth 24 tons of wheat or a thousand pounds of cheese. One particular tulip bulb was sold in exchange for a small ship! In other words, tulips were literally worth their weight in gold.
As demand grew, people began selling promissory notes guaranteeing the future delivery of prized tulip bulbs. The buyers of these pieces of paper would resell the notes at marked-up prices. These promissory notes kept changing hands-from buyer to buyer—until the tulip was ready for delivery. But it was all pure speculation because as I said, there was no way to know if the bulb was really going to produce the variety the color, that was promised. But that didn’t matter to the owner of the note, the owner only cared about having that piece of paper, so it could be traded later at a profit And people were borrowing-mortgaging their homes, in many cases-to obtain those bits of paper because they were sure they’d found an easy way to make money.
So now you’ve got all the ingredients for a huge bust-and bust it did, when one cold February morning in 1637, a group of bulb traders got together and discovered that suddenly there were no bidders-nobody wanted to buy. Panic spread like wildfire and the tulip market collapsed totally.