大学英语视听说听力第四册

第一单元

第一篇

"It's not enough to ask what successful people are like ... It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."

This is the basic idea of an intriguing book called Outliers, by the American journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The book explores the factors which contribute to people who are extremely successful in their careers, for example, the role that family, culture, and friendship play.

Gladwell examines the causes of why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, what the founder of Microsoft Bill Gates did to achieve his extraordinary success, and why the Beatles managed to redefine the whole of popular music in the 1960s.

Gladwell points out that the youth hockey league in Canada recruits from January the first, so that players born early in the year are bigger, stronger and better athletes than others born later in the year. And because they have this advantage at the start of their sports career, they're given extra coaching, and so there's a greater chance that they'll be picked for an elite hockey team in the future.

He calls this phenomenon accumulative advantage, a bit like the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Success depends on the process by which talented athletes are identified as much as it does on their own abilities.

Another aspect which contributes to success is the 10,000 hour rule. Great success demands an enormous amount of time for practice and training. For example, the Beatles performed live in Hamburg Germany more than 1,200 times over four years, much more than the 10,000 hours Gladwell claims is necessary for great success. So by the time they returned to England, they had developed their talent and sounded completely different from any other group.

In the same way, Bill Gates had thousands of hours' worth of programming because he had access to a computer at his high school. He also became a teenager just at the right time to take advantage of the latest developments in computer technology.

All through the book, Gladwell repeats his claim that it's not just talent or genius which determines someone's success, but opportunity, advantage and even simple good luck. Outliers has met with extraordinary success, matched only by Gladwell's own career over 25 years in journalism. As a result, many critics have seen it as an autobiography, in which the writer appears to be apologizing for his own personal achievements. But the idea that you have to be born at the right moment, in the right place and in the right family, and then you have to work really hard is a thought-provoking way of revisiting our traditional view of genius and great achievement. It's certainly worth reading, as long as you don't take it too seriously.

第二篇

Presenter:Hi we're talking about typical working hours in the US and in Brazil. Eric...

um... you're from the States, tell me what are the typical working hours in the