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This is the reason you are here in a university. You are here to be educated. (16)You are here to understand thinking better and to think better yourself. It's not a chance you're going to have throughout your lifetime. For the next few years, you have a chance to focus on thinking.

I think about some of the students who took advantage of their opportunities in a university. One of the stories I always like to tell is of a freshman seminar that I had a chance to teach at Harvard when I was president of the university. I taught a seminar on globalization and I assigned a reading that I had written about global capital flows. And as I did each week, I asked one of the students to introduce the readings. And this young man, in October of his freshman year, said something like the following. “The reading by President Summers on the flow of capital across countries, it was kind of interesting, but the data did not come close to supporting the conclusions.” And I thought to myself, “What a fantastic thing this was. How could somebody who had been there for five weeks tell the person who had the title ‘President' that he didn't really know what he was talking about?” And it was a special moment.

Now, I don't want to be misunderstood. I explained to my student that I actually thought he was rather more confused than I was and I argued back, but what was really important about that was the universities stand out as places that really are about the authority of ideas. (17)You see it in faculty members who are pleased when their students make a discovery that undermines a cherished theory that they had put forward.

I think of another student I had who came to me one morning, one evening actually, walked into my office and said that I had written a pretty good paper, but that it had five important mistakes and that he wanted a job. You could debate whether they actually were mistakes, but you couldn't debate that young man's hunger to learn. (18)You could not debate that young man was someone who wanted to make a difference in economics and he is today a professor of economics. And his works are more cited as an economist than any other economist in the world.

未听先知

预览三道题各选项,由选项中的 ability to think, ifelong learning process, academic, presider authority、 thirst for knowledge等词可以推测,讲座内容与教育有关,涉及教育的本质和学术权威等方面。

详解详析

16. What does the speaker say about university?

【详解】 讲座开头部分指出,在大学里,你可以更好地理解思考以及更好地独立思考。也就是说,大学能够提高学生的思考能力,因此答案为B)。


17. What do we learn from the speaker's stories about universities?

【详解】 在讲座中,讲话者共提及了两个反权威精神的故事。讲话者说,在哈佛大学的教师队伍里,如果学生的发现能够削弱他们提出的被奉若至宝的理论,他们会十分欣喜。由此可知,大学里鼓励学术民主,因此答案为A)。


18. What does the speaker see in the young man who challenged his paper?

【详解】 讲座最后提到,你可以与学生争论这些是否真的是错误,但不容争辩的是,这个年轻人有着强烈的求知欲。因此答案为A)。