2020年托业考试听力练习资料集锦
大家在备考托业听力的时候可以多多参考一些听力练习材料，了解一下考试内容，下面小编给大家带来2020年托业考试听力练习资料集锦，希望喜欢。
2020年托业考试听力练习资料1
DAVID GREENE, HOST: When you watch a presidential debate, it's easy to think that the nation is deeply divided over economic policy. But when you talk to the experts, to economists, turns out they agree on an enormous number of issues. Our Planet Money team wondered what it would sound like if you could take some of those academic ideas about the economy and put them in a candidate's mouth.
NPR's Robert Smith finds out.
ROBERT SMITH, BYLINE: To create a dream candidate, you need a dream team. We took five leading economists of all different stripes - conservative, liberal.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: You could probably describe me as left of center, to be fair.
LUIS ZINGALES: Pro-market but not necessarily pro-business.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: I'm a pretty hardcore free market guy.
KATHERINE BAICKER: I'm a professor of health economics at the Harvard School of Public Health.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: I think of myself as a radical pragmatist.
SMITH: And we said to this team, put all your differences aside and tell us what can you actually agree on. In an ideal world, what should the presidential candidates be talking about? Luigi Zingales from the University of Chicago Booth School started off with something pretty uncontroversial - the United States tax code is a disaster.
ZINGALES: All the loopholes and differences and in particular deductions.
SMITH: Now, politicians say this all the time and they rarely give a solution. But our economists all agree on a pretty good way to fix it. The United States, they all said, needs to get rid of a giant tax deduction that unfortunately millions of Americans love and enjoy.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: The mortgage interest deduction.
BAICKER: The mortgage interest deduction.
ZINGALES: Mortgage interest is extremely perverse.
SMITH: If you own a home, pay a mortgage, you can write off the interest on your taxes. And if you're one of the lucky ones, it's awesome. A little help from Uncle Sam to live the American dream. But to an economist, a tax break is a multibillion dollar gift to a very particular group, in this case a group that doesn't always need the money. Here's Dean Baker. He's a liberal with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a conservative, Luigi Zingales.
DEAN BAKER: It just makes no sense that, you know, if we have Bill Gates or whoever, some very wealthy person, we're subsidizing them to get an expensive home.
ZINGALES: So because rich People receive a much larger subsidy, the price of houses increases so much it actually makes it less affordable for the poorer people.
SMITH: If you totally eliminate this deduction, the U.S. government would have an extra $100 billion a year to pay down the deficit or maybe lower overall taxes. Why wouldn't a politician at least float the idea? Well we wanted to see how it would sound so we hired an actor. We wrote him a stump speech and put him in front of a fake audience.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: That's why when I'm elected president of the United States, I have a special plan for the middle class. All of you Americans who own your own homes, I promise to raise your tax bill by thousands of dollars a year.
BAICKER: And that's why no one elects economists.
SMITH: Katherine Baicker from Harvard says as painful and as unpopular as eliminating deductions would be, there is an upside. The system would be more fair and it would bring in all this extra revenue to the government. So I asked the panel, any chance with all that extra money you could maybe lower some tax rates too? Well, our economists did agree on one tax that has to go.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: Read my lips, no taxes for corporations. Zero, nada, nothing.
SMITH: This is not going to go over well with the middle class either. Right now President Obama and Mitt Romney are advocating lower corporate taxes, but no one said get rid of them altogether. But our conservative and liberal economists agree, in principle at least. Here's Dean Baker.
BAKER: We don't want to prevent Microsoft or General Motors or whoever it might be from investing more and improving their product line. That's a good thing in my view.
SMITH: Our economists said that if you want to tax rich people as part of public policy, tax rich people, tax the owners of the corporation, but don't tax the profits from the corporation that are reinvested and creating jobs. Now, before you think that our economic dream team has nothing but unpopular ideas, there is more to the plan.
Later today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, our economists say there might just be a way to get rid of income taxes altogether and they unveil their big plan to combat illegal drugs.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: Make them legal.
SMITH: And other economic wisdom you won't hear in the debates. Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
2020年托业考试听力练习资料2
The U.S. presidential election is approaching, and political parties and advocacy groups across the nation are making a final push to get people registered to vote and to the polls for the November 6th contest. Groups are mobilizing to get an underrepresented group of eligible voters involved in the process. Shakei Haynes is helping college students register to vote in the November election. He's been doing this since 2005 when he was 16-years-old. Now he's a political science student at Howard University in Washington. He says the job is getting easier. "Mobilizing individuals to get registered to vote has not been hard at all because people understand the urgency. In this election, you have two different contrasting views of what America should look like over the next four years," said Haynes. Some of these young African-American students will be first-time voters. Nearly half of the seven million African Americans ages 18 to 30 were unregistered and therefore not eligible to vote, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Shakei says that is unacceptable and young people, especially minorities, should not be underrepresented in the political process. "A democracy should be reflective of the people who are in it. If we can, you know, make that process a little easier for students then that is our job, and that is the reward at the end of the day," he said. Howard student Jai Dungey is from New Jersey. She says everyone should know their vote matters. "Voting is a right, it is a right. People need to realize that it is not a privilege. We should come together and just take advantage of this right we have been given and people have worked so hard to give us," said Dungey. Corion Jones is voting for the first time. He's from the battleground state of Ohio. He feels his vote could help determine the outcome of the election. "Everyone should be able to express what they want or what they feel in their own country, so the opportunity and the ability to vote is highly important," said Jones. "Just encourage sort of those last few remaining folks we are trying to reach," said Gail Kitch. Gail Kitch is chief operating officer with the non-partisan Voter Participation Center in Washington. Her group launched a voter-registration campaign by mail last year targeting young people of color and unmarried women. "The young person is sort of primed to think they are ready to participate now, and this kind of a document mailed straight to them is exactly the kind of thing they are going to respond to," she said. Now the push is on to make sure newly registered voters actually cast ballots in November.
2020年托业考试听力练习资料3
A pioneer who made arid lands bloom is the recipient of this year's prestigious World Food Prize. Daniel Hillel developed drip irrigation techniques that squeeze the most crop out of a drop of water, making farming possible in places where water is scarce. Daniel Hillel’s orchards near his home in Israel are innovation in action. Each tree row is fed by plastic tubes that drip water at the base of the tree. Irrigating drop by drop - called drip irrigation - has transformed agriculture by dramatically reducing the amount of water needed. Farmers now rely on it in water-scarce regions from Spanish vineyards, to African onion fields, to America’s fruit and salad bowl. “We in California grow about 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables of the continental United States," says University of California at Davis hydrologist Jan Hopmans. "And the reason that is possible is because of, indeed, these drip and micro-irrigation techniques.” Hillel got his start in dryland farming as a pioneer in Israel’s Negev Desert in the 1950s. "The issue was efficient use of water," he says, "because land is available. It’s extensive. Water is limited.” These desert farmers did not have the luxury of running irrigation water through channels to their crops, the way farmers have since ancient times. So Hillel and others gave plants just what they needed, just where they needed it. “The idea was to apply the water little by little, the way you spoon-feed a baby,” Hillel says. It worked so well that Hillel was soon traveling the world, showing others how to do it. Experts say drip irrigation is an innovation whose importance is growing, as climate change and rising population strain water supplies in many parts of the world. “This is where water use, water availability, water-use efficiency and climate change and crop production all converge," Hillel says. "And this has been really the essence of my career.” A career whose legacy can be measured drop by drop.
2020年托业考试听力练习资料4
Liberia’s Congress for Democratic Change (CDC), considered the country’s main opposition political party, has lost the last two presidential elections. It has been criticized as lacking the support of many of the country’s professionals and intelligentsia. Over the weekend, the CDC-USA branch held a consultative forum to mark the inauguration of its officers. The topic of the forum was “Institutional-Building through Reconciliation.” Arthur Watson, former president of the Union of Liberian Associations in the Americas, told the forum that Liberia needs institutions that are transparent, efficient, and void of nepotism and corruption. “When we build institutions and ensure that everyone operates within the framework of those institutions, we prevent conflict in our country. When our legal institutions are strong and not beholding to any one person, not even the president of the nation, each person will play by the same rules and be accountable and held to the same standards. Our people will feel safer because they will have equal access to due process under the law,” Watson said. Another speaker, Abraham Massaley, called for a strong and effective national legislature. He criticized the legislature as weak and ineffective. Massaley proposed that the best way to make legislators accountable is to elect senators every six years, instead of every nine years. “The term of office for senators and representatives needs to be short enough to maintain an accountable link with the voters. Obviously, electing senators for nine years imposes very minimum responsibility on them to account to voters. The more frequent our senators and representatives can face the voters, the more accountable they will be,” he said. Massaley said it is more costly to maintain an unproductive senator in office than to hold elections every six years. He called on the CDC to lead a constitutional reform campaign before the 2014 senatorial elections. “Anyone who has read the recent FrontPage Africa article about increment in legislative salaries and benefits totaling more than $10,000 per month per legislator will agree with me that it is far too costly to maintain an unproductive senator in office for nine years than to hold elections to replace such a senator. This is why I call on the CDC to lead the opposition to campaign vigorously for constitutional reform before, or during, the 2014 senatorial election,” Massaley said. Samuel Tweah, former national chairman of CDC-USA, said institutional building is paramount to the CDC having lost two presidential elections. He said the CDC should not just criticize the current government. Instead, it must offer itself as the alternative. “Any strategy in the CDC that focuses on [President] Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who is not seeking re-election, is fundamentally unsound and flawed. We need to show how we will be different from her,” he said. Tweah said the CDC decided to launch its institutionalization campaign because the party realizes that no political party in Liberia can win an election if that party is overwhelmingly rejected by the country’s intelligentsia. He said the CDC has also begun to address the concerns of some in the international community who have wondered whether the CDC, as the largest opposition party in Liberia, can govern. “They have a stake; they’re spending a lot of money and so they want to understand the fundamental question: Can the CDC govern? Can we trust the future of Liberia with the Congress for Democratic Change? Can it marshall the capability to deliver outcomes that are sustainable economically and politically. That question, I would say, the CDC is beginning to address,” Tweah said. There have been dissensions recently within the CDC resulting in the defection of some staunch members. Massaley called on the CDC to first begin to reconcile itself, as it attempts to lead the way for national reconciliation. “There are no permanent enemies in politics. In any large organization, such as the CDC, there will always be the struggle for competing ideas and interests. Butm in the end, the interest of the party must be the rallying point for party unity. However, I am not implying that betrayal of the party interest be swept under the bus,” Massaley said. Former member of Liberia’s disbanded Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Massa Washington, called for reconciliation through legal, economic and social justice. She called on the government to implement recommendations of various national commissions, including the TRC that called for accountability for gross human rights violations.
