全新版大学英语听说教程-4-听力原文

全新版听说教程4 听力原文

Unit 1 One World

Part B

Listening Tasks

A Conversation

Birthday Celebrations Around the World

Exercise 1

Listen to the conversation and write down answers to the questions you hear.

Chairman: Welcome to this special birthday edition of One World.Tonight we have a special program dedicated to birthday celebrations around the world.With us in the studio we have Shaheen Hag and Pat Cane,who have a weekly column on birthdays in the Toronto Daily Star. Shaheen: Good evening.

Pat: Good evening.

Chairman: Shaheen, perhaps we could begin with you.How are birthdays celebrated in India? Shaheen: Well, perhaps we're all assuming that everyone in the world celebrates their birthday. This just isn't the case.Low-income families in India, for instance,simply can't afford any festivities.And most Muslims don't celebrate their birthdays.

Pat: I think Shaheen has raised an interesting point here.The Christian church, too, was actively against celebrating birthdays.

Shaheen: Of course some Muslims do celebrate their birthdays.In Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia, for example, the rich people invite friends and families around.But not in small villages. Chairman: Here in England your twenty-first used to be the big one.But now it seems to have moved to eighteen.Is that true?

Pat: Yes, in most parts of the West eighteen is now the most important birthday.In Finland, for example, eighteen is the age when you can vote,you know, or buy wines, drive a car and so on. But in Japan I think you have to wait till you're twenty before you can smoke or drink. Shaheen: I know in Senegal, which is another Muslim country,girls get to vote at sixteen and boys at eighteen.And in Bangladesh, girls at eighteen and boys at twenty-one.

Chairman: That's interesting.I mean is it typical that around the world girls are considered to be more mature than boys?

Shaheen: Yes, I think so, and in Mexico and Argentina,for example, they have enormous parties for fifteen-year-old girls.

Pat: You know in Norway they have a great party for anyone who's not married by the time they're thirty.It's kind of embarrassing.I mean you get pepper thrown at you.

Chairman: Pepper? Why pepper?

Pat: I'm not really sure.

Shaheen: So does that mean that on your twenty-ninth birthday you can start thinking "God I better get married"?

Pat: Well, I'm not sure how seriously they take it.

Chairman: In England we have quite big parties for your fortieth, fiftieth,sixtieth and so on. Pat: Well, in Japan your eighty-eighth is considered ...Chairman: Eighty-eighth?