SECTION A In this section you will hear a
mini-lecture. You will hear the lecture ONCE ONLY. While listening, take notes
on the important points. Your notes will not be marked, but you will need them
to complete a gap-filling task after the mini-lecture. When the lecture is over,
you will be given two minutes to check your notes, and another ten minutes to
complete the gap-filling task on ANSWER SHEET ONE. Use the blank sheet for
note-taking. Now listen to the mini-lecture.
Complete the gap-filling task. Some of the gaps below require a maximum of
THREE words. Make sure the word(s) you fill in is(are) both grammatically and
semantically acceptable. You may refer to your
notes. Did Marco Polo Tell the Truth There is a
controversy about Marco Polo’s trip to China. Did Marco Polo tell the truth
If you ask his 13%century contemporaries, the answer would be a resounding
no. As Polo’s 1298 book, The Travels of Marco Polo, told Europeans
something they (1)______ to believe,
1.______ Westerners just regard Polo’s account as a
romantic fantasy. According to some critics, Polo never even
(2)______foot in
2.______ China. Had he been there, he would have reported important aspects
of 13th-century Chinese life that were (3) ______ such as tea drinking,
3.______ calligraphy, the binding
of women’s feet to keep them small, and, most glaring, the Great Wall of
China. Frances Wood, head of the British Library’s Chinese
department, in her 1995 book Did Marco Polo Go to China, argues that Polo
probably never got beyond (4)______. His China stay was
4.______ (5) ______ with the help of Arabs and Persians
who had visited China 5.______ .
But a century after he was ridiculed as "the man of a million lies", a
Renaissance geographer hailed him as "the most diligent investigator of (6)
______ shores".
6.______ Today, reference books state flatly that Polo
went to China, even though flaws in his story have been known for centuries.
Polo’s supporters explain Polo’s omissions like this:
Tea drinking was popular in (7)______China in Polo’s time,
Lamer says, but was not yet so
7.______ popular in the north and central regions, where
Polo resided. Foot binding was limited to (8) ______ ladies confined to their
houses. Only
8.______ rarely would anyone see them except kin. While Polo said
nothing about calligraphy, he did tell the West about (9) ______ money, which
9.______ China
had used for centuries. Anyhow, from Polo, the West learned many things
about China. Polo probably told quite a few lies. But even
Polo’s No. 1 critic, Wood, deems him a useful "(10) ______ of information".
Whether
10.______ he told only half of what he saw, or saw merely half of what he
told, the fact remains: He made history happen.