華埔學報 第四十八期 民國九十四年 13

WHAMPOA - An Interdisciplinary Journal 48(2005) 13-23

Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book

Juei-ching Chung
評估電腦托福考試的課堂聽講理解測驗教材
Department of Foreign Languages, Chinese Military Academy, Taiwan
Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book
Abstract

The paper discusses the listening component, especially with regard to academic lectures,
of two commercial TOEFL practice books published within the past five years. It examines
the way the common course books reflect current defects in preparing students for the TOEFL
test in their treatment of the listening skill for the purpose of self-study or the TOEFL course.
Based on the instructional implications of interactive models of listening, the paper presents a
three-phase approach to adapting and supplementing a lecture selected from Lingua TOEFL
Computer-Based Test (CBT) Listening Practice Test 1-4. It implies that in order to help
learners to identify various aspects of lecture comprehension and gradually become efficient
listeners through their practice phase teachers who desire to improve their students’
performance need to adapt and supplement listening tasks at the beginning of the instructional
phase.
Keywords: TOEFL, Lecture comprehension, Materials evaluation, Adapt, Supplement

1. Introduction see diagrams, photos, or other visual aids.

The Test of English as a Foreign
Language (TOEFL) measures the ability of
nonnative speakers of English to use and
understand North American English as it is
spoken, written, and heard in college and
university settings. In 1998, the TOEFL was
converted from a paper-and-pencil test to a
computer-based test (CBT) format. The CBT
has four sections: listening, structure,
reading, and writing. The listening section is
computer-adaptive, which means that the
computer gives the participants test
questions that are aimed at their ability levels.
Contents of lecture comprehension include
academic seminars and discussions or academic
lectures. The conversations are about 10 to
15 lines long and may be between two
students, a student and a professor, or a
student and a university administrator. The
seminars are longer, about two or three
minutes, and include dialogue by two to five
speakers. The professor will do most of the
talking, with students also participating. The
lectures may be two different lengths, either
1－3 minutes long or 3－4 minutes long.
During all of these exercises, listeners may
All questions are based on what is
stated or implied by the speakers. Among
four sections, listening has been found to be
the most difficult part for test-takers because
they can hear the material only once and
cannot go back to the questions.
Furthermore, listeners are not given the
opportunity to see the listening input or to
take notes while it is being played. Once the
input has finished, the question is heard and
both the question and response options are
displayed on the screen. In addition to
traditional multiple-choice items, the test
includes item types that ask test-takers to
select two options, to match or order objects,
and to select a visual.
Principal materials currently available for
the TOEFL are primarily practice books
because the majority of them contain
exercises of the type contained in the
TOEFL test. They cover several units of the
tests, a listening script, and answer keys.
Teachers need some things that are not
currently provided in any TOEFL books,
such as a comprehensive teacher’s manual
with useful teaching strategies, detailed
answer explanations, explicit language focus,
14 黃埔學報 第四十八期 民國九十四年
examination tips, various types of unit test
and topics, numerous practice tests, and an
extension activity to develop more skills.
Additional aids to listening include
providing teachers with cassettes and CDs.
Some provides CD-ROMs, as well. Some
course books, especially those published in
the United States, not only classify the test
questions into different categories according
to strategies (e.g., idiom, key word,
intonation, inference) or themes (e.g.,
science, technology, art) but also provide
language tips and background knowledge. In
order to find out how far currently available
materials meet the requirements of a
test-taker and/or a teacher helping test-takers,
two packages of test materials that are
popular and widely recommended by
Amazon bookstore will be analyzed: Lingua
TOEFL CBT Listening Practice Test 1-4
(LinguaForum 2001) and Delta’s Key to the
TOEFL CBT (Delta Publishing 1996).
While some TOEFL course books
merely serve as a self-study practice books
or packages, others provide useful tips for
teachers to arrange the course and even
suggest ideas to extend skill practice. Lingua
TOEFL CBT is a practice book especially
designed for helping test-takers’ listening
comprehension. Delta’s Key to the TOEFL
CBT can be a real coursebook for teachers to
arrange a test-oriented course. If a book is
aimed at providing test-takers with some
unit practice, it should cover different types
of questions, genres, themes, and layouts of
a lecture. If a book is designed for students’
independent-study learning as well as to be a
teacher’s course guidebook, it should
include teaching strategies to deal with
typical features of academic lectures. A good
listening coursebook is crucial to teachers
who intend to help students prepare for the
TOEFL listening test. This study will
evaluate the usefulness and defects of the
two books from the perspectives of a
test-taker and a teacher preparing learners
for the exam. It will also discuss how
teachers adapt and supplement based on the
book in order to present listening strategies
in a more interactive way.
2. Literature review
2.1 Listening comprehension and
academic listening
In accounting for the complex nature of
processing spoken language, it has been
hypothesized that “bottom-up” and
“top-down” modes work together in a
combined cooperative process[15]. Listeners
hear the spoken text according to their own
purposes for listening, their expectations,
and their own store of background
knowledge. Brown and Yule[3] suggest
dividing language functions into two major
divisions: language for interactional
purposes and language for transactional
purposes. A model of materials designed for
second-language listening comprehension should
combine these language functions
(interactional and transactional) and
language processes (top-down and
bottom-up). In the situation of a listening
comprehension test such as TOEFL,
listeners usually have to deal with
transactional information in order to
construct old or new concepts. Listeners
may have had the prior knowledge, but they
have to match the stream of sound held
briefly in the short-term memory with
information from the long-term memory in
order to elaborate upon and verify the
interpretation of the input. In addition, they
have to respond in time and within an
anxious test situation.
Strategies presented for listeners should
be oriented toward discovering the
underlying structure and argument of a
lecture. Specifically, they should illustrate
nonnative listeners’ variable success in
recognizing the main points of a lecture as
derived from their following either
“point-driven” (i.e., problem-solution) or
“information-driven” (i.e., description and
relational presentations) strategies in listening.
A mismatch of strategy with lecture
structure can lead to serious
miscomprehension of main points. It is
essential for teachers to determine those
 Juei-ching Chung: Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book
lecturing and listening strategies that are
most effective for comprehension and
retention. Most common issues concerning
how teachers help students in preparing for
the listening comprehension test include
speech rate, vocabulary elaboration,
discourse markers/rhetorical structure, and
background knowledge. Among all,
discourse markers and rhetorical structure
attract researcher’s attention for their
inherent usefulness in making the structure
of the discourse understandable and as
potential aids in training listeners to
comprehend better [4][9][13][14][18][19].
Instruction has a sound basis in
presenting and evaluating sample lectures
that illustrate the forms and variable
functions of the features of academic
lectures [8][9][13]. They include: (1) global
macro-organizers; (2) local macro-organizers;
(3)move types; (4)transaction types and
sequence structure; (5) asides; (6) definitions;
(7) vocabulary elaborations. Certain lexical
phrases or rhetorical markers definitely help
signal the major content and sequence in an
argument and demarcate the boundaries of
nonessential information. Making learners
more aware of the structure of the discourse
should improve their ability to process
lectures—to predict, identify, and associate
meanings and references both within and
outside the lectures.
2.2 Criteria for materials evaluation
Because the TOEFL practice book or
package is based on the TOEFL test,
question types tend to be the focus of the
material designers. Most practice books
explain the reasons for the answer based on
the question. Questions based on lecture
comprehension usually cover identification
of the purpose and scope of a lecture,
recognition of key lexical items related to a
topic, and familiarity with different styles of
lecturing [17]. Among the nine most
important listening activities as identified by
university lecturers in the Powers survey
[16], six seem to affect the question types of
the TOEFL listening test:
1. Identifying major themes or ideas of
15
lectures
2. Identifying relationships (e.g., order or
cause and effect) among major ideas in
a lecture
3. Identifying the topic of the lecture
4. Inferring relationships between
concepts contained in the lecture
5. Comprehending key information
presented in the lecture
6. Identifying supporting ideas and
examples in the lecture.
In Richards’ taxonomy, the lecturers
rated as most important for academic
success are those activities that address a
listener’s understanding of the main points
and supporting details of a lecture. Instead
of taking notes using a pen, listeners have to
try to remember all they can and take notes
in their head. The first question is usually
about the general topic, main idea, or
purpose of the discussion or lecture. They
will have to get a sense of the topic in the
first few sentences. Sometimes, the TOEFL
people will try to trick listeners—the lecture
may begin with a reference to a past lecture
or something else. Answers that are too
general or too specific are included in order
to test listeners’ overall comprehension.
Some TOEFL practice books give reasons
for the incorrect choice rather than simply
trying to convince listeners with
explanations of the correct choice. This
leads test-takers to search the wrong answers
first in order to avoid the tricks. Few
practice books mention the structure of the
speech or point out the discourse markers
and rhetorical structure. As a result, those
learners who study the TOEFL test on their
own do not benefit much from the books.
Currently, there is no commercial course
book available in the market for teachers
trying to help students prepare for the
TOEFL test. Therefore, it seems that the
principal TOEFL-oriented books can be
evaluated from the most useful part of the
book—how “accessible” is the information
or explanations provided by the “Answer
Key?” Do readers really understand the
explanations of the correct choices? Is there
any ambiguity in the explanations? How
16 黃埔學報 第四十八期 民國九十四年
convincing are the explanations? Are readers
clear about what they are supposed to be
tested on and answer? How do teachers
adapt or supplement a lecture in order to
help test-takers reasonably interpret the
speakers’ intention and infer the meaning in
the sequence of the argument?
2.3 Recognition
For pedagogical purposes, it is useful to
focus on two major language functions:
language for transactional purposes and
language for interactional purposes, as in the
case of the TOEFL test. It is important for
material designers to take into account the
nature of listening and information
processing as framed in a top-down and
bottom-up conceptualization. Tasks of
top-down processing are aimed at helping
listeners evoke their prior knowledge and
global expectations about both language and
the world. Here, listeners bring their known
language to bear on the task of
“understanding” the incoming stream of
speech. This allows listeners to predict
on the basis of context (both the
preceding linguistic context and the
situation-and-topic, setting-and-participants context)
what the incoming message at any point can
be expected to mean and how it fits into the
whole.
On the other hand, tasks of bottom-up
processing enable listeners to understand
incoming language that is worked out
proceeding from sounds, to words, to
grammatical relationships and lexical
meanings, and finally to a composite
meaning of the message based on the
incoming language data[11]. Therefore,
tasks or activities are especially useful early
in the semester, especially if they are
designed with a focus on introducing
students to learning goals such as language
competence, listening strategies, and critical
thinking. Through the activities, teachers
introduce concepts with any eye toward
helping learners develop self-awareness and
self-consciousness.
Models of listening instruction have been
widely developed over the past decades and
have been integrated into materials design.
Designers of the materials dealing with
academic skills, especially reading and writing,
offer step-by-step activities that help learners
comprehend the text or generate ideas.
However, academic listening materials have
been rarely seen partly because they need a
high level of academic (EAP) and
pre-professional/professional (EPP) facility
with English rather than only “general” English
skills. Lecture comprehension covers different
fields, mostly about important issues present in
the campus culture, on aspects of American
culture, and on social, economic, and political
issues of general interest and concern in both
international and national arenas.
As to the test situation, the main goal of
academic listening here is to comprehend
the speech and be able to choose the correct
answer. By and large this kind of material
features a student response pattern based on
a listening-and-question-answering model
with occasional innovative variations on this
theme. No matter how well done, this kind
of listening instruction represents only a
small promportion of unidirectional
non-interactive (i.e., “one-way”) listening.
Such listening programs are not sufficient to
the task of developing functionally
competent listening skills[12]. Teachers
should adapt and supplement materials to
encourage students’ linguistic development,
critical listening, and critical thinking. If the
spoken text represents a heavy load of
information, simplification of the text might
aid comprehension. Simplification is a
procedure designed to make things easier for
or more accessible to the learner by means
of editing of texts to reduce linguistic or
conceptual difficulty [10]. Ideally, the
language classroom should help students to
develop listening processes in a systematic
way through activities in which linguistic
information, contextual clues, and prior
knowledge interact.
3. Evaluation of the materials
Although researchers have addressed
the importance of two major
 Juei-ching Chung: Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book
strategies—top-down and bottom-up
processing of information[5][21][20] －
course books or course packages for
preparing for the TOEFL test have been
rarely centered on developing test-takers’
listening strategies. For example, Delta’s
Key to the TOEFL Test arranges each unit
similar to the real test by providing some
test skills such as helping listeners identify
the topic and main ideas, comprehending
details, matching words and categories,
sequencing event in a process, determining
reasons, making inferences and predictions.
Most of the commercial TOEFL listening
practice test books are essentially practice
and are not designed to assist teachers in
helping test-takers or to help test-takers to
really solve their listening problems.
Most TOEFL listening books including
Lingua TOEFL CBT, are merely designed
for test-takers’ self-study. Lingua TOEFL
CBT consists of four actual TOEFL-like
listening practice tests with answer
explanations added. Often it explains the
main topic or comprehension question by
eliminating the other incorrect answers
without analyzing the real feature of a
lecture. If the critical information that gives
clues to the test questions is printed in bold
or colorful type, the listening script will
definitely help self test-preparers’ grasp the
overall structure of the spoken text and
indicate major sections. This feature of the
listening script will get students familiarized
themselves with a variety of lectures and
develop their ability to identify major
themes, ideas, key information, supporting
statements, and examples in the lecture. By
pointing out discourse markers in italics, the
listening script can help self test-takers to
become aware of the major content and
sequence in an argument, and to
discriminate essential from nonessential
information. It is important that materials
development take principles of students’
independent learning into account.
Major TOEFL course books currently
sold on the market today exclusively focus
on exercises or practices of test questions
accompanied by listening scripts. Few of
17
them incorporate listening activities through
which learners can develop listening skills
and strategies for lectures. Until recently,
some course books, such as Delta’s Key to
the TOEFL Test, have contained test-type
questions in exercises, quizzes, and tests;
annotated answer keys and explanations that
refer to units of study; descriptions of new
computer-unique test items; convenient
organization and thorough cross-referencing
of skills; suggestions for student-centered
pair and group activities, games, and oral
presentations; and peer reviews.
However, as lecture comprehension is
scripted and linguistically academic, it is
difficult and cognitively demanding for
those students who have never experienced
the TOEFL test to comprehend. In order to
help test-preparers quickly familiarize
themselves with the TOEFL test, Delta’s Key
has analyzed question types, categorized
them, clearly described each type, and noted
the proportion in which each appears on the
test. They have also suggested strategies for
the test in general and for each type of
question in particular. They have included
discussion of “trick” questions and have
built on the philosophy that listening skill
building and assessment are interrelated.
Overall, their course addresses the specific
language skills necessary for success on the
TOEFL and in university studies.
However, if a practice book like Delta’s
Key to the TOEFL Test also features itself as
a course, it should incorporate tasks to build
two things: (1) a base of content experiences
that helps to develop expectancies and,
gradually, a repertoire of familiar top-down
networks of background knowledge; and (2)
a base of outcome experiences that helps to
build a repertoire of familiar
information-handling operations in lectures
that are applicable to similar context.
Therefore, tasks give students opportunities
to analyze selected aspects of both language
structure and discourse markers and to
develop some personal strategies to facilitate
learning are important, especially at the
beginning of the skill-training stage[15].
18 黃埔學報 第四十八期 民國九十四年
4. Example of adaptation and
supplementation
Lecture comprehension requires much
more from a listener than just recognizing
phonemes and understanding information at
the essential level. Listeners also need to be
able to recognize the macro-structural items
in a text, synthesize information across
clauses, and be able to put lecture
information into their own words[6].
Therefore, an adapted version close to an
authentic context with spontaneous speech
rate, tone, and discourse can be helpful to
students preparing for the TOEFL test in an
EFL/ESL environment. Teachers can expand
the scope or the amount and type of
information that students will be exposed to
and tested on by using pre-, while-, and
post-listening tasks (See Appendix A), or
they can provide videotape related to the
topic or theme of the lecture as a
supplementary activity. At the beginning of
the course, note-taking training can be
permitted because it might be a good
approach to understanding features and
structure of the lecture discourse.
The arrangement of testing questions
and the script used should be employed to
help students activate their schemas.
Therefore, questions might be adapted or
rearranged to actually assess students’
abilities to understand what academic
lectures are composed of. Additional
listening tasks and a chronological list of
questions in accordance with the script may
help students to succeed in the two major
task areas: global comprehension and local
comprehension. Moreover, taking a lecture
adapted from the original version of the
TOEFL test and presenting it in an actual
classroom could provide a more relaxed and
less anxious atmosphere for the students. In
this teaching situation, students would be
allowed to answer the questions in real time,
which prevents the test from being a
memory test. As the training stage goes on,
students should be given the opportunity to
use the lecturing and listening strategies that
they have found to be most effective for
retention of information.
Students must be presented with the
features of a lecture and the listening
strategies needed to identify the key words,
and they must develop the skill of
recognizing “markers” and concentrating on
searching for the message－and not giving
up hope during their reception of the flow of
information. Sometimes simplification of
the text might be necessary for students to
better grasp the main features of a lecture at
the beginning of the training course. A
lecture selected from Lingua TOEFL CBT
Listening Practice Test 1-4 (see the original
version in Appendix B) is offered as an
example of how teachers can interact with
learners by adapting the listening material
and supplementing the listening task (see the
adapted version in Appendix C). Once
test-preparers are familiar with the top-down
and bottom-up strategies integrated into a
range of listening tasks, they will experience
less anxiety while studying for the test at
their own pace. Teachers also have to raise
their awareness through meta-cognitive
strategies, including self-monitoring and
self-evaluating. Finally, teachers should bear
in mind the students’ ultimate purpose in
attending the course in mind—passing the
TOEL test. Students should be given the
opportunity to practice a variety of test units
in real situations, and to discuss their
weaknesses after tests, and they should be
encouraged to continue rehearsing their
skills.
5. Conclusions
According to Hutchinson and Waters,
textbook evaluation is basically a
straightforward, analytical “matching
process; matching needs to available
solutions” [7]. It is naive to suppose that a
test is itself a context for teaching, and thus
every English teacher certainly has a
thorough knowledge of the language and of
the test requirements. In fact, most teachers
will need remedial and digressive teaching
methodologies, which are not currently
provided by course books or packages but
 Juei-ching Chung: Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book
are definitely necessary so that teachers can
prepare their specific students.
Teachers should first understand the
course itself very well and their students’
weaknesses in coping with lecture
comprehension. The materials teachers
choose for the course should be flexible
enough to supplement any task that enables
learners to activate their prior knowledge
and develop both bottom-up and top-down
processing and reasoning skills.
Overall, the two TOEFL listening
practice books mentioned in this paper are
friendly and pleasing course books. There is
a variety of practice exam tasks, and the
answer key provides useful strategy and
examination hints (together with
explanations and tips). There is an attempt to
be teacher friendly in Delta’s Key to the
TOEFL Test, with a selection of tapescripts
at the back of the book, and a page devoted
to each tapescript. For teachers, the course
books serve as a starting point. What is more
important is being able to select a text the
perceived flaws of which are correctable, in
the sense that the teacher can easily make
the author’s biases more harmonious with
his or her own[1] and more appropriate to
his or her students’ proficiency levels and
learning goals.
This paper has evaluated the usefulness
and defects of the two leading TOEFL
practice books from the perspectives of a
test-preparer and teachers preparing learners
for the exam. It also gives an example of
adapting a test unit, supplementing listening
tasks, and rearrangement of test questions. It
is hoped that lecture comprehension will be
achieved to some extent by getting the
students to predict what the answers might be,
by encouraging them to listen selectively, and
by adapting the script into a more authentic
spoken lecture with more “oral” features
(possibly using a native speaker to deliver or
record the adapted version). However,
teachers should go back to review the lecture
in its original version because students are
exposed to it and are tested on it.
19
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[12] Morley, J., Academic listening
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comprehension instruction: Models,
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Appendix
A. Teaching approach:
(I) Pre-listening phase
Pre-listening task (given by a native speaker
during the first hour of the class):
Topic: What do you think the lecture is about?
Lexical Items: Look at the following words
and discuss the meaning with your
classmates.
(a) silver chloride
(b) prism
(c) radiation
(d) ultraviolet (UV) radiation
(e) quartz tube
(f) UV light (blacklight)
(g) ergosterol
(h) (f) fluorescence
Pronunciation:
(1) Check to see if you can correctly
pronounce the lexical items listed above.
(2) Have you ever heard about the following
people? All of them have something to do
with the items listed. Listen to your teacher
pronounce the names and make sure you can
identify the sounds.
(a) Johann Wilhem Ritter
(b) Peter Cooper Hewitt
(c) David Olivetti
(II) While-listening phase
Activity while listening (given by a
native speaker during the first hour of the
class):
Stage 1
Your teacher will explain various
phenomena of ultraviolet radiation in this
lecture. You will have to organize the
following in chronological order:
(a) Why scientists named the radiation
“ultraviolet.”
(b) How ultraviolet light is applied to (used
in) photography
(c) How blacklight can be created
(d) The experiments of physicist Johann
Ritter with prisms and silver chloride.
Stage 2
When you listen to your teacher present
these well-known events in physics, watch
out for the names connected with each event
or phenomenon. Now, articulate the names
again in your mind and listen to your teacher
 Juei-ching Chung: Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book
giving a lecture about ultraviolet radiation
(see the adapted version in Appendix C).
Check your understanding from time to time
while hearing. Feel free to interrupt your
teacher if you do not understand.
Stage 3
Ultraviolet (UV) light will now be
applied in daily life. Pay special attention to
the content or object connected with the
present.
Stage 4
Now, you may have grasped the scope
of the lecture your teacher has given. What
is the topic of the lecture?
(a) The life of Johann Ritter
(b) Silver chloride
(c) Types of radiation
(d) The uses of ultraviolet radiation
(III) Post-listening phase
Post-listening Task (discussed in
students’ mother tongue during the second
hour):
Your teacher will play a recording or
the whole lecture (Appendix A). Discuss the
similarities with and differences from the
authentic lecture presented by the previous
teacher. Write down the difficult parts or the
problems you encounter in the process of
authentic and recorded lecture
comprehension, respectively. Discuss the
problems with your peers.
B. The Original Version:
Instructions
Listen to the following recorded talk,
and then answer the multiple-choice
questions below.
The Listening Text
In 1801, a German physicist named (1)
2.1,3.1Johann Wilhem Ritter experimented
with silver chloride and a prism. He passed
a beam of sunlight through a prism, which
divided the beam into the colors of the
spectrum. He then placed some chloride in
21
each color to see what would happen. The
red caused little change. Deep violet,
however, made the bits of chloride darken.
Then Ritter tried some chloride in the
lightless space just beyond the violet. The
material grew much darker, almost as
though it were being covered with soot. He
had discovered a powerful, invisible
radiation beyond the violet in the sun’s color
spectrum.
2.2Scientists named this radiation
“ultraviolet,” meaning “beyond violet
light.” They found that it traveled in waves
like light and at the same speed. It differed
however, in having shorter wavelengths and
a higher frequency—that is, more waves per
second—and in fact it was invisible to the
human eye.
For a century, scientists used ultraviolet
radiation from sunlight, electric sparks, or
electric arcs. In 1901, (2) 3.2Peter Cooper
Hewitt of New York City 2.3made a much
more powerful source by passing an electric
current through a quartz tube filled with
mercury vapor, called the “UV light” or
“blacklight.”
In the 1950s, (3) 3.3David Olivetti
discovered that ultraviolet rays produce
vitamin D in the body. The radiation acts on
a fatty substance under the skin, called
ergosterol, and changes it to vitamin D.
Today, many foods contain man-made
vitamin D.
4.1Ultraviolet radiation has also
proved to be a powerful germ killer, and
most meats sold today in America have been
irradiated to kill germs. 4.2Ultraviolet lights
are also used in hospitals to keep air sterile.
More recently, 2.4photographers have
learned how to use ultraviolet light to take
pictures in the dark, and detectives can use
the glow that ultraviolet light causes
substances to give off, called fluorescence,
to detect forged documents, fingerprints, and
other clues.
Not all of ultraviolet light’s effects are
positive, however. UV rays are also responsible
for tanning and burning the skin, which can lead
to cancer, so care must be taken on sunny days
to protect oneself from them.
22 黃埔學報 第四十八期 民國九十四年
The Questions
1. What is the main topic of this lecture?
a. Types of radiation
b. The life of Johann Ritter
c. The uses of ultraviolet radiation
d. Silver chloride
2. The professor explained various
phenomena of ultraviolet radiation in
this lecture. Put these events into
chronological order.
Click on a sentence. Then click on
the space where it belongs. Use each
sentence only once.
The word “Ultraviolet” is coined.
Ultraviolet light is applied to photography.
The black light is invented.
Johann Ritter experiments with prisms & silver
chloride.
(1) (3)
(2) (4)
3. Physicists have invented many kinds of
things. Match the person with his
discovery.
Click on a name. Then click on the
space where it belongs. Use each
name only once.
Johann Ritter
Peter Hewitt
David Olivetti
Discovered that Discovered Created the
UV rays can ultraviolet rays. ultraviolet lamp.
create vitamin D.
4. How is ultraviolet light applied in
everyday life?
Click on 2 answers.
A To kill germs in meat.
B To improve fuel efficiency.
C To produce ergosterol.
D To keep air sterile in hospitals.
B. Adapted Lecture
Let us begin by considering the history
of technology and science. The things we
know today, even the things that are
common knowledge today, were not always
known. Indeed, many of the scientific and
technological advances that have greatly
benefited society—things that we more or
less take for granted—were discovered and
developed only through painstaking research,
experimentation, and, yes, trial and error.
Here is an example. There was a time
when the electromagnetic spectrum was a
mystery. Even when scientists began to
understand light there was no understanding
of wavelengths beyond the visible-light
spectrum.
This started to change in 1801, when a
German physicist named Johann Wilhelm
Ritter experimented with a prism and the
compound silver chloride. Initially, he
passed a beam of sunlight through a prism,
which divided the beam into the colors of
the visible-light spectrum. Next, he placed
some chloride in the beam of each color, just
to see what might happen. He found that the
red beam caused little change but that the
deep violet beam made the chloride darken.
Then came the great breakthrough—he
placed some chloride in the “lightless” space
just beyond the violet. The material grew
much darker, almost as though it were being
covered with soot. What Ritter had
discovered was a powerful, invisible form of
radiation beyond the violet in the Sun’s
color spectrum!
This new radiation was called
“ultraviolet,” meaning “beyond violet.”
Scientists soon found that it traveled in
waves—just like visible light—and at the
same speed. However, it differed from
visible light in that it had a shorter
wavelength and a higher frequency (more
waves per second) and in the fact that it was
invisible to humans.
For the next century, scientists
experimented with ultraviolet radiation
using sunlight, electric sparks, and electric
arcs. Then, in 1901, the American scientist
Peter Cooper Hewitt of New York created a
 Juei-ching Chung: Lecture Comprehension in the CBT TOEFL Practice Book
much more powerful source by passing an
electric current through a quartz tube filled
with mercury vapor, which he called the
“UV light” or “blacklight.”
Still, this amazing scientific discovery
had produced no practical benefits. Finally,
in the 1950s, David Olivetti found that
ultraviolet rays produce vitamin D in the
body. The radiation acts on a fatty substance
under the skin, called ergosterol, and
changes it to vitamin D. Today, many foods
contain man-made vitamin D.
So, let’s look at this. It took 150 years
for this startling discovery—that there were
wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation
beyond the visible spectrum—to result in
any practical benefits. In the end, however,
the discovery of UV light would prove to be
very valuable to society.
In addition to producing vitamin D, it
was found that UV radiation was a powerful
germ killer, and today most meats are
評估電腦託福考試的課堂聽講理解測驗教材
鍾瑞卿
陸軍軍官學校外文系
摘要
本文評論美國出版且獲得英語教學界推薦的兩本託福聽力測驗教材－Lingua
TOEFL Computer-Based Test (CBT) Listening Practice Test 1-4 和 Delta’s Key to the
TOEFL CBT，並探討託福課堂聽講理解測驗中考生最大的障礙和就教材、教學法提出見
解。
關鍵詞：託福測驗、課堂聽講理解測驗、教材評估、改編、補充
23
irradiated with UV to kill germs. Ultraviolet
lights are also used in hospitals to keep air
sterile, and more recently photographers
have used ultraviolet light to take pictures in
the dark. Law enforcement officials even use
UV to discover forged documents,
fingerprints, and other clues.
Along with these benefits, however, it
has been found that UV can have negative
effects, as well. We now know that
ultraviolet light is responsible for
tanning—and burning—of the skin, which
can lead to cancer. Thus, we have to take
UV seriously in order to protect ourselves on
sunny days. We can do this by using
ointments that prevent the UV radiation
from damaging the skin.
This is a good example of how a
primary discovery in physics has resulted in
benefits to society and enlarged our
knowledge in other areas, such as the
prevention of skin cancer.
24 黃埔學報 第四十八期 民國九十四年

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