大学英语四级新标准视听说Unit 5文本

Unit5
Inside view
Conversation1
Andy: I loved the question you asked Tim Pearson about financial crisis. Janet: Well, I shouldn’t have asked it. After all he is an expert!
Andy: There you go again, you’re always putting yourself down. You don’t know how to take a compliment（称赞，恭维）.
Janet: True. I never find it easy to accept praise. Do you think women have been conditioned to accept criticism（批评，指责）
Andy: Well, I think that’s gender stereotyping（对...产生成见，模式化）. Do you think that men are good at accepting compliments
Janet: Well, they seem to be able to deal with criticism much better.
Andy:Don’t you believe it!
Janet: Anyway, thank you, I accept your compliment.
Andy: Not only that, but I think you’d make a really TV presenter.
Janet: I’m not so sure. I haven’t seen many women in television here. Andy: Well, in the media in general, I can assure（确保，使确信） you that there are lots of women in presenting and management roles.
Janet: Well, maybe, but I’m Chinese as well. I don’t think I’ll be accepted as a presenter on a British TV programme.
Andy:Gender and racial stereotyping. I mean, it depends on what job and sometimes where you work in London, of course, but generally, Londoners are proud of their multi-ethnic community. Especially the Chinese, because cook great food! Janet: Now who’s doing the stereotyping! But seriously, look at all these smart women walking to work. Are they all secretaries or managers
Andy:OK, it’s a good point. I think that many women manage to get middle management
jobs in most professions. But it’s true that a lot of them talk about the glass ceiling.
Janet:What’s the glass ceiling
Andy: It’s the situation where a woman is successful in a company, but then she hits the glass ceiling- this invisible（不可见的，隐形的） barrier which stops her going any higher in her career.
Conversation 2
Janet: So what do you think causes the glass ceiling
Andy: It’s partly prejudice by men about women’s abilities in management. But it’s also when women take time off to have children; they don’t always recover the same power when they return to work.
Janet: It not fair.
Andy: You’re right, it’s not fair. I read here that only five to ten percent of the top companies in America and British are run by women.
Janet:That’s extraordinary! In China there appears to be more women in top jobs, but I may be wrong.
Andy: And look, here are some more statistics. About 60 percent of university graduations in Europe and North America are women. And something like 75 percent of the eight million new jobs in Europe have been filled by women.
Janet: So the percentage of women in the total workforce is growing.
Andy:You got it! But women in the UK are in a slight majority—there are more women than men.
Janet: Do you think it’s especially bad in the UK, and in London especially Andy: Not really. Some jobs which were traditionally done by women, like nursing, are now also done by men, and like engineering which are done by women. And there
are plenty of women’s football teams!
Janet: Women’s football! We have women’s football in China too.
Andy: Mind you, their matches don’t get many spectators!
Janet: I give up. What else has changed
Andy:I think fathers spend more quality time with their children today. But I bet you it’s still the women who spend most looking after the children and the home. Janet: I guess that’s true everywhere.
Andy: Anyway, I am going home to watch the match on TV. The local women’s team, of course.
Janet: It’s typical of you men! You always bring it back to football!
Andy:And that’s typical of you women! You always bring it back to gender stereotyping.
Outside View
In South Korea, women are participating more in the economic and political sectors than they were a decade ago. But career aspirations for female students in South Korea still tend to be based on the traditional division of gender roles. They are accustomed to thinking of such jobs as teaching and nursing, what their male counterparts aim to become scientists and judges. Many of these young women are aware that if they want to be independent they need to train so they can have their own source of income. In the previous generation, women did not have the right to speak, because they did not have their own financial support. Therefore, our generation of women must work to be financially independent. The growth in the number of women who work has caused the typical South Korean household to change. For example, there are more women living alone. This is because they can make their own money rather than depend on a man to support them. There has also been a rapid rise in the number
of families in which both parents work. Married women increasingly want to participate in society but they need to balance family life and work. After marriage, we all struggle with how to take care of our children and work. The introduction of day care centers at some work places, such as the Chohung bank, has helped to make it possible for mothers to work. Whilst these women are at work, their children are in the day care center. There they are usually very well looked after, receiving a balanced diet, playing lots of games and doing plenty of exercise. Day care centers are increasingly popular all across the world because they enable parents to work. Women employees at Chohung Bank find it a big help, although the system is far from perfect. So far, my children have been well taken care of by our day care center. However, it will be difficult when my children go to elementary school because I often have to work late. Who will take care of them Our family recently decided to live together with our grandparents who might be able to take care of my children. Mothers also face other problems when they go to work. Women have traditionally been responsible for raising their children and often feel a strong sense of guilt when they put their children into day care. Some worry that it will have a negative impact on their children and that they may fail as a parent. On top of this, South Korean women often end up being less well paid than men with the same education. Korean women’s status in the labor market has not been much improved in spite of a continuing rise in their presence in the labor force and the level of their education. The majority of working women are still crowded in low wage and low status jobs many of which are found in the secondary market. So there are still lots of issues facing women going to work--- they are still having to choose between their families and their careers. What can be done to ensure that women are rewarded for their valuable contribution to the working world
Sector 部门，行业，领域
Aspiration 志向，抱负
Whilst 在……时，虽然
Counterpart 植物相当的人，职能相当的物
Guilt 负罪感，内疚，自责
Presence 存在，在场，出席
Listening in
Presenter: Has feminism(女权主义，男女平等主义） gone too far in the way men are shown in advertisements Do you think there are too many ads now in which men are shown as stupid or weak
Speaker 1:Definitely, yes. I can think of three ads right now where men are shown as stupid. The one that annoys me most is the one where this guy is doing this DIY job and he’s no good at it. And his girlfriend is standing by waiting to do the job herself. Fine, if it was one ad, but it’s not, it’s a whole attitude now to men. It’s not good for us, it’s not good for women either.
Speaker 2:Um, well, yes, I do feel that feminism has gone too far. I mean, great, women have made a lot of progress in the last 40 years, but it shouldn’t mean we treat men as inferior(等级或地位) 低等的，次要的）, which is what we see in quite a few ads these days. So no, I don’t really like the way men are portrayed in advertisements.
Speaker 3: Has feminism gone too far in advertisements No way! Feminism has only just begun, there’s no real equality of pay in this country, and men still have all the top jobs. Women continue to be shown as objects in ads rather than as real people, and until that stops I really don’t think we can say that feminism has gone too far. I agree that in advertisements these days men aren’t always shown as super-masculine, but that’s good and much nearer the truth.
Speaker4：Ads are about selling and I guess selling the idea that men are weak
makes people laugh. And if people laugh at an ad they are more likely to remember it and therefore more likely to buy the product. But on the whole, I’d disagree;
I think men are still shown driving expensive cars and working, you know-looking powerful. Then coming home to their wives who look after children.
Speaker5: Well I find the way men are shown in ads annoying. There’s that one where this woman is angry with her partner for his choice of car insurance. The idea is that she’s smart and he’s dumb（笨的，愚蠢）.
Speaker6:I’ve never really thought about it, I think it’s just to make people laugh, isn’t, to show the guy as a bit of an idiot and the woman as the boss. It’s just a joke. I don’t really know much about feminism. I don’t think so, no.
Passage 2:
The differences between men and women interest everyone. What are these differences exactly How great are they To what extent are they due to biology and how much the result of upbringing A lot of research has been done on the subject. Tests show, for example, that men tend to be more logical and analytical than women. Their spatial skills are better and they‘re better at problem-solving and mathematics. Girls, on the other hand, learn to speak earlier than boys and in general women have better verbal skills than men .They are more nurturing ,have more empathy and have better social skills.
Research suggests that at least some of these differences are a result of our biochemistry and brain function. Brain scans show that men have bigger brains than women. Before men get too excited about this we should point out that both sexes do equally well in intelligence tests. So the fact that men have bigger brains does not mean they‘re more intelligent. But there are other important brain differences. Men have more grey matter in their brains and women have more white matter. Because
of the different ways in which white matter and grey matter function, this could explain why men are better at spatial tasks and mathematics, and women are better at language skills.
Now let’s take a look at the effect of hormones on the brain. Testosterone is the hormone that makes the body masculine .It‘s present in both men and women but obviously there‘s a lot more of it in men .It seems that testoste rone has the effect of making men more interested in systems and less interested in people .This would explain why women have better social skills than men. All this is not to say that it‘s biological differences alone that make men and women different. Upbringing is very important too and parents treat boys and girls quite differently. For example, up to the age of two, mothers make more eye contact with daughters and talk to them more. Men are a lot more physical with their sons and play rougher and noisier games with them. Both men and women speak more loudly to boys than to girls and girls are stroked(轻抚) more than boys. We will probably never be able to decide exactly how important upbringing and biology are in creating male and female differences. But the journey of discovery is fascinating.。