老托福听力是复习托福听力很有价值的材料，无忧托福网为同学们带来托福听力每日一练（共42天）的原文，同学们可以听写后对照原文，希望对同学们有所帮助。
托福听力每日一练第12天：（97年8月）
演讲听写训练 1
Welcome to the Forewinds historical farm where traditions of the past are preserved for visitors like you. Today our master thatchers will begin giving this barn behind me a sturdy thatched roof able to withstand heavy wind and last to 100 years. How do they do it? Well, in a nutshell, thatching involves covering the beams or rafters, the wooden skeleton of the roof, with reeds or straw. Our thatchers here have harvested their own natural materials for the job the bundles of water reeds you see lying over there beside the barn. Thatching is certainly uncommon in the United States today. I guess that's why so many of you have come to see this demonstration. But it wasn't always that way. In the 17th century, the colonists here thatched their roofs with reeds and straw just as they'd done in England. After a while though they began to replace the thatch with wooden shingles because woods were so plentiful. And eventually other roofing materials like stone, slate and clay tiles came into use. It's a real shame that most people today don't realize how strong and long-lasting a thatched roof is. In Ireland where thatching is still practiced, the roof can survive winds up to 110 miles per hour. That's because straw and reeds are so flexible they bend but don't break in the wind like other materials can. Another advantage is that the roofs keep the house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And then of course there's the roof's longevity. The average is 60 years but they can last up to 100. With all these reasons to start thatching roofs again, wouldn't it be wonderful to see this disappearing craft return to popularity?
演讲听写训练 2
A lot of people in the United States are coffee drinkers. Over the last few years, a trend has been developing to introduce premium specially blended coffees known as gourmet coffees into the America market. Boston seems to have been the birthplace of this trend. In fact major gourmet coffee merchants from other cities like Seattle, San Francisco, came to Boston where today they are engaged in a kind of coffee war with Boston's merchants. They are all competing for a significant share of the gourmet coffee market. Surprisingly the competition among these leading gourmet coffee businesses will not hurt any of them. Experts predict that the gourmet coffee market in the United States is growing and will continue to grow to the point that gourmet coffee will soon capture a half of what is now a 1.5 million-dollar market and will be an eight million dollar market by 1999. Studies have shown that coffee drinkers who convert to gourmet coffee seldomgo back to the regular brands found in supermarkets. As a result these brands will be the real losers in the gourmet coffee competition.
演讲听写训练 3
You may remember that a few weeks ago we discussed the question of what photography is. Is it art or is it a method of reproducing images? Does photograph belong to museum or just in our homes? Today I want to talk about a person who tried to make his professional life an answer to such questions. Alfred Stieglitz went from the United States to Germany to study engineering. While he was there he became interested in photography and began to experiment with his camera. He to ok pictures under conditions that most photographers considered too difficult. He took them at night, in the rain and of people and objects reflected in windows. When he returned to the United States he continued this revolutionary effort. Stieglitz was the first person to photograph skyscrapers, clouds and views from an airplane. What Stieglitz was trying to do in his photographs was what he tried to do throughout his lifemake photography an art. He thought that photography could be just as beautiful a form of self-expression as painting or drawing. For Stieglitz, his camera was his brush. While many photographers in the late 1800s and early 1900s thought of their work as a reproduction of identical images, Stieglitz saw his as creative art form. He understood the power of the camera to capture the moment. In fact he never retouched his prints or made copies of them. If you are in this class from today, I'm sure you'd say: Well, painters don't normally make extra copies of their paintings, do they?
