托福听力学科词汇积累 - 经济学

很多考生之所以在托福听力考试中听不懂，其中最重要的原因就是因为词汇量有限，要想攻克托福听力，积累词汇是重中之重，尤其是要积累词汇的语音识别。这一努力对于大家做相关学科的学术类讲座非常重要，因为词汇的熟悉可以大大降低该篇的难度系数。今天以经济学为例，跟大家分享有关economics相关专业词汇，请大家注意的是这些词不仅仅是经济学词汇，更是托福考试中的高频词汇。

下面在以TPO6第一篇讲座为例，来看这些词汇的熟悉对于托福听力的帮助。Professor：

Now when I mention the terms “boom andbust”, what is that going to mind?

Student：

The dotcom crash of the ‘90s.

Professor：

Ok. The boom in the late 1990s when allthose new Internet companies sprung up and then sold for huge amounts of money.Then the bust around 2000…2001 when many of those same Internet companies wentout of business. Of course, booms aren’t always followed by busts. We’vecertainly seen times when local economies expanded rapidly for a while and thenwent back to a normal pace of growth. But, there’s a type of rapid expansion,what might be called the hysterical or irrational boom that pretty much alwaysleads to a bust. See, people often create and intensify a boom when they getcarried away by some new industry that seems like it will make them lots ofmoney fast. If you think that by the 90s, people would have learned from thepast. If they did, well, look at tulips.

在讲座的开头部分，教师举例讲解了经济发展周期的一普遍现象-繁荣与萧条，语速较快，难度等级高。学生一开始就直接懵了，因为教授的讲座内容一开始就说了这节课的主题：“Now when I mention the terms “boom and bust”,”而学生不知道boom和bust是什么意思。无形中注意力就会集中于在脑海里搜索什么事boom and bust。在他们苦苦追寻这两个单词的意思时，简短的开头部分就已经讲完了。然而不幸的是和往常一样，开头部分又有考题的涉及，如

7. What is the professor’s opinion aboutthe dot-com crash?

A: She thinks that people should haverealized it would happen

B: She does not believe that anything likeit will happen again

C: She is surprised that it did not have moreserious consequences

D: She is confident that people learned avaluable lesson from it

其实这道题目是在考核语法的虚拟语气，与过去事实相反，听力是这样说的“If youthink that by the 90s, people would have learned from the past.”因此这道题正确答案应该是A.但是学生如果知道boom一词是繁荣，bust是萧条的话，就不会在无谓的词汇回忆上浪费时间，最终如泰戈尔所说：错过了太阳时，你在哭泣，那么你也会错过星星。