托福听力背景是什么

在新托福考试中，听力是听说读写四项里最关键的项目，除了阅读，其他三项都会考察听力能力。

因此我们才会说：得听力者得托福。

听力基础不好的同学，一定要耐心去做精听练习并配合背诵托福听力的单项词汇。

那么听力考试的背景是什么？首先，新托福考试的听力部分分为两个section，如果遇到听力加试，则再多一个section。

每个section 中，有一段conversation和两段lecture，均要求考生在未知题目的情况下听完，之后再做题，不能复听，答案提交后也不能修改。

考试时间总共是50分钟。

每个section考17道题，答题时间为10分钟，节奏由自己控制，简单的题速度快一点，拿不准的题可以多花些功夫。

平均来讲，大概每道题的答题时间是30秒左右。

这与我们以往的英语考试很不相同，尤其是lecture大多会长达5分多钟，如果不是英语基础极好，很难在不做笔记的情况下准确答题。

而这些材料，都是模拟美国校园里的对话和课堂讲座，因而对话反应校园生活，而讲座内容具有一定科普性。

举例来说，这是一篇TPO中的讲座，主要内容是天文学。

Professor：OK, last time we talked about ancient agricultural civilizations that observed the starsand then used those observations to keep track of the seasons. But today I want totalk about the importance of stars for early seafarers, about how the fixed patternsof stars were used as navigational aids. OK, you’ve all heard about the Vikings and their impressive navigation skills, but theseafaring people of the pacific islands, the Polynesians and the Micronesians, werequite possibly the world’s greatest navigators. Long before the development of, uh,advanced navigational tools in Europe, pacific islanders were travelling from NewZealand to Hawaii and back again, using nothing but the stars as their navigationalinstruments.Um, the key to the pacific islanders’ success was probably their location near theequator. What that meant was that the sky could be partitioned, divided up, muchmore symmetrically than it could farther away from the equator. Unlike the Vikings,early observers of the stars in Polynesia or really anywhere along the equator wouldfeel that they were at the very center of things, with the skies to the north and theskies to the south behaving identically, they could see stars going straight up in theeast and straight down in the west. So it was easier to discern the order in the sky than farther north or farther south, where everything would seem more chaotic.Take the case of the Gilbert Islands, they are part of Polynesia, and lie very close tothe equator. And the people there were able to divide the sky into symmetrical boxes,according to the maindirections, north, east, south and west. And they couldprecisely describe the location of a star by indicating its position in one of thoseimaginary boxes. And they realized that you had to know the stars in order tonavigate. In fact there was only one word for both in the Gilbert Islands, when youwanted to the star expert, you ask for a navigator.Um, islanders from all over the pacific learned to use the stars for navigation, andthey passed this knowledge down from generation to generation. Some of themutilized stone structures called stone canoes, ah, and these canoes were on land, ofcourse, and you can still see them on some islands today. They were positioned as ifthey were heading in the direction of the points on the sea horizon where certainstars would appear and disappear during the night, and, um, young would-benavigators set by the stones at night and turned in different directions to memorizethe constellations they saw, so they could recognize them and navigate… by themlater on when they went out to sea.One important way the Polynesians had for orienting themselves was by using zenithstars. A zenith star was a reall y bright star that would pass directly overhead atparticular latitude…at a particular distance from the equator, often at a latitudeassociate with some particular pacific island. So the Polynesians could estimate theirlatitude just by looking straight up, by observing whether a certain zenith star passeddirectly overhead at night, they’d know if they have rates the same latitude as aparticular island they were trying to get to. Um, another technique used by thePolynesians was to look for a star pair, that’s two stars that rise at the same time, or set at the same time, and navigators could use these pairs of stars as reference points,because they rise or set together only at specific latitudes. So navigators might seeone star pair setting together. And, uh…w ould know how far north or south of theequator they were. And if they kept on going, and the next night they saw the pairsof stars setting separately, then they would know that they were at a different degreeof latitude. So looking at rising and setting star pairs is a good technique. Um…actually it makes more sense with setting stars; they can be watched instead of tryingto guess when they’ll rise.Uh, OK, I think all this shows that navigating doesn’t really require fancy navigationalinstruments; the peoples of the pacific islands had such expert knowledge ofastronomy as well as navigation that they were able to navigate over vast stretches ofOpen Ocean. Uh, it's even possible that Polynesian navigators had already sailed to the Americas, centuries before Columbus.通过阅读这篇讲座原文，可以看到，托福听力的讲座部分，内容非常广泛，且具有一定专业性，如果时间非常充足，当然可以大量阅读背景文件进行备考，但是如果时间紧张，则应该采取更为科学的备考方式。