大學(xué)體驗英語綜合教程3聽力

　　大學(xué)體驗英語綜合教程3聽力：Bathtub Battleships from Ivorydale

　　American mothers have long believed that when it comes to washing out the mouths of naughty children, nothing beats Ivory Soap (a registered trademark of the Proctor & Gamble Company). This is because its reputation for being safe, mild, and pure is as solid and spotless as the marble of the Lincoln Memorial. It doesn't even taste all that bad. And should you drop it into a tubful of cloudy, child-colored water, not to worry - it floats.

　　Ivory Soap is an American institution, about as widely recognized as the Washington Monument and far more well respected than Congress. It had already attained this noble status when Theodore Roosevelt was still a rough-riding cowboy in North Dakota. Introduced in 1879 as an inexpensive white soap intended to rival the quality of imported soaps, it was mass marketed by means of one of the first nationwide advertising campaigns. People were told that Ivory was "so pure that it floats," and the notion took hold. As a result, at least half a dozen generations of Americans have gotten themselves clean with Ivory.

　　So many hands, faces, and baby bottoms have been washed with Ivory that their numbers beat the imagination. Not even Proctor & Gamble knows how many billions of bars of Ivory have been sold. The company keeps a precise count, however, of the billions of dollars it earns. Annual sales of Ivory Soap, Ivory Snow, Crest toothpaste, Folger's coffee, and the hundreds of other products now marketed under the Proctor & Gamble umbrella exceed thirty billion dollars.

　　The company has grown a bit since it was founded in 1837 in Cincinnati, Ohio, by a pair of immigrants named William Proctor and James Gamble, each of whom pledged ,596.47 to the enterprise. For decades Proctor & Gamble manufactured candles and soap in relatively modest quantities. It took more than twenty years for sales to top one million dollars, which they did shortly before the Civil War . The company's big break came with the introduction of its floating soap and the realization that an elaborate advertising campaign could turn a simple, though high-quality, product into a phenomenon. The soap's brand name was lifted from "out of ivory palaces," a phrase found in the Bible. So successful was this new product and the marketing effort that placed it in the hands of nearly every American that the company soon built an enormous new factory in a place called Ivorydale.

　　Proctor & Gamble never forgot the advertising lessons it learned with Ivory. For instance, it was among the first manufacturers to use radio to reach consumers nationwide. In 1933 Proctor & Gamble's Oxydol soap powder sponsored a radio serial called Ma Perkins, and daytime dramas were forever after known as "soap operas." Over the years the company added dozens of new product lines such as Prell shampoo, Duncan Hines cake mixes, and the ever-present Tide, "new and improved" many a time. To this day, however, Ivory Soap remains a Proctor & Gamble backbone product.

　　Ivory remains a favorite among consumers, too, and no wonder. With a bar of Ivory Soap in your hand, you are holding a chunk of American history. If you like, you can even wash your hands and face with it and be assured that it is "ninety-nine and forty-four-one-hundredths percent pure." And it floats.

　　The latter quality of Ivory Soap is especially attractive to children. Generations of little boys armed with toothpicks, miniature flags, or leftover parts from model ships - there are always a few - have converted bars of Ivory Soap into bathtub battleships. A note of warning for any small boys who may be reading this: Mothers tend to frown on the practice.

　　大學(xué)體驗英語綜合教程3聽力：Not Now, Dr. Miracle

　　Severino Antinori is a rich Italian doctor with a string of private fertility clinics to his name. He likes watching football and claims the Catholic faith. Yet the Vatican is no fan of his science.

　　In his clinics, Antinori already offers every IVF treatment under the sun, but still there are couples he cannot help. So now the man Italians call Dr Miracle is offering to clone his patients to create the babies they so desperately want.

　　And of course it's created quite a stir, with other scientists rounding on Antinori as religious leaders line up to attack his cloning plan as an insult to human dignity. Yet it's an ambition Antinori has expressed many times before. What's new is that finally it seems to be building a head of steam. Like-minded scientists from the US have joined Antinori in his cloning adventure. At a conference in Rome last week they claimed hundreds of couples have already volunteered for the experiments.

　　Antinori shot to fame seven years ago helping grandmothers give birth using donor eggs. Later he pioneered the use of mice to nurture the sperm of men with poor fertility. He is clearly no ordinary scientist but a showman who thrives on controversy and pushing reproductive biology to the limits. And that of course is one reason why he's seen as being so dangerous.

　　However, his idea of using cloning to combat infertility is not as mad as it sounds. Many people have a hard job seeing the point of reproductive cloning. But for some couples, cloning represents the only hope of having a child carrying their genes, and scientists like Antinori are probably right to say that much of our opposition to cloning as a fertility treatment is irrational. In future we may want to change our minds and allow it in special circumstances.

　　But only when the science is ready. And that's the real problem. Five years on from Dolly, the science of cloning is still stuck in the dark ages. The failure rate is a shocking 97 per cent and deformed babies all too common. Even when cloning works, nobody understands why. So forget the complex moral arguments. To begin cloning people now, before even the most basic questions have been answered, is simply a waste of time and energy.

　　This is not to say that Antinori will fail, only that if he succeeds it is likely to be at an unacceptably high price. Hundreds of eggs and embryos will be wasted and lots of women will go through difficult pregnancies resulting in miscarriages or abortions. A few years from now techniques will have improved and the wasteful loss won't be as excessive. But right now there seems to be little anyone can do to keep the cloners at bay.

　　And it's not just Antinori and his team who are eager to go. A religious group called the Raelians believes cloning is the key to achieving immortality, and it, too, claims to have the necessary egg donors and volunteers willing to be implanted with cloned embryos.

　　So what about tougher laws? Implanting cloned human embryos is already illegal in many countries but it will never be prohibited everywhere. In any case, the prohibition of cloning is more likely to drive it underground than stamp it out. Secrecy is already a problem. Antinori and his team are refusing to name the country they'll be using as their base. Like it or not, the research is going ahead. Sooner or later we are going to have to decide whether regulation is safer than prohibition.

　　Antinori would go for regulation, of course. He believes it is only a matter of time before we lose our hang-ups about reproductive cloning and accept it as just another IVF technique. Once the first baby is born and it cries, he said last week, the world will embrace it.

　　But the world will never embrace the first cloned baby if it is unhealthy or deformed or the sole survivor of hundreds of pregnancies. In jumping the gun, Dr Miracle and his colleagues are taking one hell of a risk. If their instincts are wrong, the backlash against cloning - and indeed science as a whole - could be catastrophic.

　　大學(xué)體驗英語綜合教程3聽力：I Have His Genes But Not His Genius

　　It's Christmas Eve 2040, and I'm the only bartender still working that afternoon, and the house is practically empty. I see this guy down at the end of the bar, sitting by himself. I bring him a fresh drink, and wish him greetings of the season. He looks at me, sort of funny, and says: "Do you know who I am?"

　　I admit I don't.

　　"Here, maybe this will help," he says, and he pulls a little picture out of his wallet. An old portrait, really old, like centuries old. It's a young man in profile: sharp nose, weak chin, definite resemblance to my friend here. At the bottom, there's a caption: "W. A. Mozart."

　　Now it's my turn to look at him funny. Then it hits me like a brick. "You're that clone guy," I say. "The guy in the papers back in the '20s."

　　"In the flesh. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. I have his brain, his heart, his DNA. He's my father and my mother and my brother. He's my identical twin, except I was born 247 years later."

　　So he starts talking. It takes him a long time to explain, and I didn't get it all, but I got a lot.

　　In 2001, Congress passed a ban on cloning humans, but of course mad scientists went ahead with secret cloning.

　　And then, there was this software billionaire who was nuts about Mozart, and was especially nuts about Mozart's Requiem. He set up a secret institute in Switzerland and hired some top biologists and told them they'd get class="main">