20篇听写练习听力原文

Passage 1

Midlife Crisis

Unhappiness in middle age, also known as midlife crisis, is a universal experience. People around the world seem to share an emotional design in life. That design is shaped like the letter U. Levels of happiness are the highest when people are young and when they are old. In the middle, however, most people’s happiness and life satisfaction levels drop. Some people suffer from midlife depression more than others. But it happens to men and women, to single and married people, to the rich and poor and to those with and without children. Generally speaking, people reach their lowest levels between the ages of about forty and fifty-five. But then, as they continue into old age, their happiness starts to climb back up. Why does all this happen? One possibility is that people recognize their limitations in middle age and give up some of their long-held dreams. Passage 2

Good Companion

A good companion is better than a fortune, for a fortune cannot purchase those elements of character, which make companionship a blessing. The best companion is one who is wiser and better than ourselves. Greater wisdom and goodness than we possess lifts us higher mentally and morally. It’s true that we cannot always choose all of our companions. Some are thrust upon us. But the experience is not altogether without compensation. Companion is education, good or bad; it develops manhood or womanhood, high or low; it lifts the soul upward or drags it downward; it ministers to virtue or vice. There is no half way work about its influence. It saves or destroys lustily. Nothing in the world is surer than this. Sow virtue, and harvest will be virtue. Sow vice, and the harvest will be vice. Good companions help us to sow virtue; evil companions help us to sow vice.

Passage 3

Global Text Project

Books are a high cost of higher education. But the Global Text Project hopes to create a free library of one thousand electronic textbooks for students in developing countries. The aim is to offer subjects that students may take in their first few years at a university. The books could be printed or read on a computer or copied onto a CD or DVD. The Global Text Project is a new technology, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit on the Internet. But only one or two people will be able to make the final edits in texts. The project includes a committee of scholars, mostly from developing countries, to advice on required textbooks and their content. The group’s first book on information systems is being tested in Indonesia. Project organizers also want to offer textbooks in Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. They are working with a translation company in the United States.

Passage 4

Hemingway

American writer, Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois. He started his career as a writer in a newspaper office at the age of seventeen. During the 1920s, Hemingway became a member of the group Americans living in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises. Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms, the study of an American ambulance officer’s