Nome...... Matricola ......
LISTENING TEST- ENGLISH 3 CL4
SEPTEMBER 2007
This test has two parts: A & B. Part A is alead-in exercise. Part B is a note-taking & summarising test.
Part A. After listening toPart A you will have 1 minute to answer the True/False questions below.
______Time magazine’s Invention of the Year in 2005 was a revolutionary kind of car
______Twenty friends developed YouTube together
______YouTube is a village in Silicon Valley
______YouTube has made ordinary people celebrities
Part B. Note-taking and summarising. After listening 3 times, you will have 15 minutes to write a short summary of the information given in Part B. Your summary should be approximately 75-100 words in length. Use the space provided below to write your summary.
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Part A: FFFT
Summary 1: (99 words)
The YouTube video-sharing website is successful not only because it is free and user-friendly, but also thanks to its users’ appreciation of original videos from ‘real people’ that present their ideas or perspective, rather than those of the media, on topics the users feel important or are interested in. This ‘sharing’ has created a sense of community, to the point where users even feel responsible for ‘flagging’ inappropriate content and ensuring that rule-breakers are removed from the site. In terms of technology, cheap camcorders and user-friendly video software have been fundamental to this revoultion in video making and sharing.
Summary 2 (136 words)
The speaker explains why YouTube is the leading website for watching and sharing original videos. The fact that YouTube is free (anyone can watch videos or register and upload videos) and extremely user-friendly has helped make it successful, but technology has also contributed: with cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software, home videos are now easy to make. Cultural and social factors have also contributed: like all ‘Web 2.0’ sites, TouTube offers not only useful tools but also a space for social interaction. What’s more, the site offers authentic videos from ‘real’ people, rather than ‘filtered’ through television or newspapers in a biased or incomplete way. Users are responsible for ‘policing’ the site so that inappropriate content such as pornography can be removed and the accounts of rule-breakers disabled.
Tapescript
After listening 3 times, you will have 15 minutes to write a short summary of the information given in Part B. Your summary should be approximately 75-100 words in length.
Part A. Lead-In Exercise. You will hear Part A one time only.
2006 was a big year for innovation in technology. Some fascinating new inventions were announced, ranging from a revolutionary kind of car that is able to travel 5,000 kilometers on less than 4 liters of petrol, to hypoallergenic cats that don’t make you sneeze. And yet, TIME magazine had no trouble choosing it’s Invention of the Year for 2006: the undisputed winner was YouTube.
Just what is YouTube ? Well, most young people in Europe or the US would have no problem answering THAT question: It’s a website, an online servic, and a unique one at that. Its creators have invented a new way for millions of people to entertain, educate, empathize, criticize, shock and rock with one another, on a scale that had never been seen before.
It all started in late 2004, where else but in Silicon Valley. Three twenty-year-old friends were complaining at a dinner party about how easy it was to share photos with your friends online, but how difficult it was to do the same thing with video. So they decided to do something about it, and within just a few months had put together a procedure for allowing videos in basically any format to be played on virtually any web browser. Then, they built a kind of virtual web village, a website where people could post their own videos and watch and rate and comment on and search for and bookmark other people’s videos. And the rest was history.
In the past 30 months, thousands of ordinary people have become famous, many famous people have been embarassed, politicians have aired their beliefs in a new way, and organizations, including non-profit volunteer groups, have found a new way to get their message out. . It’s not just young people who are using YouTube: ask 80 year-old English pensioner Peter, whose online nickname is geriatric 1927. Peter has become an international star, thanks to YouTube. His very first video, which he posted on August 5, 2006, has to date been viewed more than 2 and a half million times. Peter is the all-time second-most-popular uploader of videos to YouTube. Indeed, the site’s user base is ages 18 to55, in countries spanning the entire globe. With such a large and diverse user base, YouTube offers something for everyone.
I think it would be fair to say that, in much the same way as blogs transformed normal people into journalists, YouTube has allowed normal people become celebrities. Indeed, some people say that YouTube was only started by those three twenty-year-olds... that it is the rest of us, in our bedrooms and basements, with our broadband and webcams, that have invented it.
Part B
Now, listen to Part B. After listening 3 times, you will have 15 minutes to write a short summary of the information given in Part B. Your summary should be approximately 75-100 words in length.
Founded in February 2005, today YouTube is the leader in online video, and the premier destination to watch and share original videos on the worldwide web. After starting off with just a single video of a trip to the zoo, the site has grown and grown and currently has a library holding more than 100 million videos, to which its users add 70,000 more videos every day ! Why ? It’s simple: YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on and across the Internet, through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and e-mail.
So, It’s no surprise that YouTube has quickly become the leading destination on the Internet for video entertainment, because everyone can watch videos on YouTube, and anyone can upload their own ideos.. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual.
The inventors of YouTube had originally imagined a site on which people would share their holiday and travel videos... or maybe present objects they would be offering for auction on E-Bay. Little did they imagine that, as soon as people learned about the site, they would ‘hi-jack’ it, for their own uses. Instead of posting their holiday videos, they sent in stand-up comedy, home-made documentaries, guitar solos, home videos of babies being born in hospital delivery rooms, eyewitness videos of news from the Hurrican Katrina devastation in New Orleans or from Baghdad after a bombing—with videos from both sides. So I think it’s fair to say that, as more people decide they want to share the special or important moments they’ve captuerd on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.
I’d say there are really 3 things that have made YouTube’s success possible. First, the revolution in home video production, which was made possible by the availability of cheap camcorders and easy-to-use video software. Secondly, and perhaps more interestingly, YouTube is part of a process that analysts soemtimes call Web 2.0, which is also represented by sites such as MySpace and Wikipaedia, which offer useful web tools but, above all, thriving communities where people create and share information together. With these sites, the more people use them, the better they work... and this is a a sort of self-fueling collaboration that would never have been possible without Internet. Like MySpace, and lots of the groups on Yahoo!, YouTube offers a space for social interaction that its users appreciate. Finally, there has been a cultural revolution which has contributed in a big way to the success of YouTube. Consumers are impatient and sometimes even angry with the mainstream media for presenting ideas in a biased and incomplete way... People want to see videos that haven’t been filtered through television or newspaper editors... they don’t want to hear about, say, the war in Iraq from the perspective of journalists who have only visited the area briefly. They want to watch videos uploaded by real soldiers who are fighting there and see videos uploaded by the real people who live and die there. On YouTube, although the quality of the videos varies, they are authentic.... whether they are videos of someone’s pet kitten, or the birth of someone’s baby or celebrity video diaries of Paris Hilton or of politicians..
I’ll correct myself: I do see a few more reasons for the site’s success. And these regard the way the site has been set up. Above all: the YouTube service is free. To use it, all one has to do is register. And by registering, users are able to upload and share videos, save favorites, create playlists, and comment on the videos.
The site also has quite a few user-friendly features: including the possibility of uploading either public or private videos –in other words users can decide to broadcast their videos publicly or share them privately only with friends and family. Subscriptions are another interesting feature, since they allow users to keep track of their favorite users' new videos .... so, for example, fans of TouTube uploader Peter in the UK will be alerted each time he uploads a new video. Quick Capture is another function that makes YouTube extremely easy to use – Users with a webcam and Flash software are able to instantly record --or ‘capture’--videos directly onto the site, rather than having to prerecord, then upload the video.
One problem YouTube is forced to cope with is inappropriate content, when people upload things they shouldn’t... let’s say, copyrighted images or pornography. Interestingly, it’s not the site owners but rather the community of users that effectively polices the site for inappropriate material, because the users can report or ‘flag’ content that they feel is inappropriate, and once it is flagged, YouTube reviews the content and removes it from the system within minutes if it violates the rules. They also disable the accounts of repeat offenders.