四级听力讲座 1 及讲座 2 原文及解析
 
Recording One
Today I'm going to talk about a very special kind of person. Psychologists call them masters of deception. Those rare individuals with a natural ability to tell with complete confidence, when someone is telling a lie. (16) For decades, researchers and law enforcement agencies have tried to build a machine that will do the same thing. Now, a company in Massachusetts says that by using magnetic brain scans, they can determine with 97% accuracy whether someone is telling the truth. 
They hope that the technology will be cleared for use in American courts by early next year. （17）But is this really the ultimate tool for you? The lawyers of tomorrow? You will not find many brain scientists celebrating this breakthrough. The company might be very optimistic, but the ability of their machine to detect deception has not provided credible proof. That's because the technology has not been properly tested in real world situations. In life, there are different kinds of lies and diverse contexts in which they're told. These differences may elicit different brain responses. 
Does their hypothesis behind the test apply in every case? We don't know the answer, because studies done on how reliable this machine is have not yet been duplicated. Much more research is badly needed. Whether the technology is eventually deemed reliable enough for the courts will ultimately be decided by the judges. Let's hope they're wise enough not to be fooled by a machine that claims to determine truthfulness at the flip of a switch. They should also be skeptical of the growing tendency to try to reduce all human traits and actions to the level of brain activity.  Often, they do not map that easily. 
Moreover, understanding the brain is not the same as understanding the mind. Some researchers have suggested that thoughts cannot properly be seen as purely internal. Instead, thoughts make sense only in reference to the individuals external world. So while there may be insights to be gained from matching behavior to brain activity, those insights will not necessarily lead to justice in a court of law. Problems surround the use of machines to spot deception, at least until it has been rigorously tested. （18）A high tech test that can tell when a person is not telling the truth. Sounds too good to be true. And when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Question 16. What have researchers and law enforcement agencies tried to do?
Questions17. How do many brain scientists respond to the Massachusetts companies so called technological breakthrough? 
Question 18. What does the speaker think of using a high tech test to determine whether a person is telling the truth? 
 
 

 
讲座 1 解析
如同上课时我们讲到的，讲座题一定要听好开头，开头往往揭示主题。本篇开头即提到一类 人，masters of deception。对于生僻名词必然给出解释: Those rare individuals with a natural ability to tell with complete confidence, when someone is telling a lie.
当我们听到 But is this really the ultimate tool for you? The lawyers of tomorrow? You will not find many brain scientists celebrating this breakthrough. 时，我们得知很多科学家持反对意见。
 
我们在设问后的问题之处得知 but 之后便是 17 题的答案，has not provided credible proof.
本篇难点在于 16,17 题离得比较近，符合我们所讲的连续出题原则，考生须在确定一题答案 后马上开始对下一题的判断。后面大段不出题，知道最后给出最后一题的答案。
18 题作者对于使用高科技仪器测谎的想法是 too good to be true，所以需要选择和负面色彩 相关的选项。
 
Recording Two
Last week, I attended a research workshop on an island in the South Pacific. Thirty people were present, and all except me came from the island called Mcclure in the nation of Vanuatu. They live in sixteen different communities and speak sixteen distinct languages. In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community. （19）Yet the residents of each village speak a completely different language. According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Plank Institute for the science of human history, this island, just one hundred kilometers long and twenty kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps forty different indigenous languages. （20）Why so many? We could ask the same question of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language or even a handful. Instead, today, our species collectively speaks over seven thousand distinct languages, and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet. For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions that in the milestones. the tropical island of new guinea is home to over nine hundred languages, Russia, twenty times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. 
Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the two hundred and fifty thousand people who live on Vanuatu’s eighty islands speak 110 different languages. But in Bangladesh, a population six hundred times greater speaks only 41 languages. How come humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates. Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions. They hypothesized that language diversity must be about history, cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations. 
But when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different
countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific. These prior efforts all examine the degree to which different environmental, social, and geographic variables correlated with a number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged. The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical saying, “Correlation does not equal causation”. 
 
Question19. What does the speaker say about the island of Mcclure? 
Question 20. What do we learn from the talk about languages in the world? 
（缺 21 题）
 
讲座 2 解析
本篇听好开头 an island in the South Pacific，即知道内容说的和岛屿相关，当听到 the island called Mcclure in the nation of Vanuatu，便需认真听后面的内容，They live in sixteen different communities and speak sixteen distinct languages. 知道本文确切内容为语言。
19 题为转折后出题：the residents of each village speak a completely different language。
20 题符合问句后出题。答案为转折处 instead 之后的内容： today, our species collectively speaks over seven thousand distinct languages, and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.