上一篇：托福备考第42天——TPO听力材料分析（TPO3）（四）
听写并高亮后的结果：
Listen to part of lecture in an art history class. The professor has been discussing the origins of art.
Professor: Some of the world's oldest preserved art is the cave art of Europe, most of it in Spain and France. And the earliest cave paintings found to date are those of the Chauvet Cave in France discovered in 1994. And you know, l remember when l heard about the results of the dating of the Chauvet paintings, l said to my wife, "Can you believethese paintings are over 30,000 years old?" And my 3-year-old daughter piped up and said, "ls that older than my great-grandmother?" That was the oldest age she knew.
And you know, come to think of it. lt's pretty hard for me to really understand how long 30,000 years is too. l mean, we tend to think that people who lived at that time must have been pretty primitive. But l'm gonna show you some sldes in a few minutes and I think you will agree with me that this art is anything but primitive. They are masterpieces. And they look so real, so alive that it's very hard to imagine that they are so very old.
Now, not everyone agrees on exactly how old. A number of the Chauvet paintings have been dated by a lab to 30,000 or more years ago.That would make them not just older than any other cave art, but about twice as old as the art in the caves at Altamira or Lascaux, which you may have heard of.
Some people find it hard to believe Chauvet is so much older than Altamira and Lascaux, and they noted that only one lab did the dating for Chauvet, without independent confirmation from any other lab. But be that as it may, whatever the exact date, whether it's 15,000, 20,000 or 30,000 years ago, the Chauvet paintings are from the dawn of art. So they are a good place to start our discussion of cave painting.
Now, one thing you've got to remember is the context of these paintings. Paleolithic humans - that's the period we are talking about here, the Paleolithic, the early Stone Age, not too long after humans first arrived in Europe - the climate was significantly colder then and so rock shelters, shallow caves were valued as homes protected from the wind and rain.
And in some cases at least, artists drew on the walls of their homes. But many of the truly great cave art sites like Chauvet were never inhabited. These paintings were made deep inside a dark cave, where no natural light can penetrate. There's no evidence of people ever living here. Cave bears, yes, but not humans. You would have had to make a special trip into the cave to make the paintings, and a special trip to go see it. And each time you'd have to bring along torches to light your way.And people did go see the art.
There are charcoal marks from their torches on the cave walls clearly dating from thousands of years after the paintings were made.So we can tell people went there. They came but they didn't stay. Deep inside a cave like that is not really a place you'd want to stay, so, why? What inspired the Paleolithic artists to make such beautiful art in such inaccessible places? We'll never really know of course, though it's interesting to speculate.
But, um , getting to the paintings themseves, virtually all Paleolithic cave art represents animals, and Chauvet is no exception.The artists were highly skilled at using, or even enhancing, the natural shape of the cave walls to give depth and perspectives to their drawings, the sense of motion and vitality in these animals.Well, wait till l show you the slides.
Anyway, most Paleolithic cave art depicts large herbivores. Horses are most common overall with deer and bison pretty common too, probably animals they hunted. But earlier at Chauvet, there is a significant interest in large dangerous animals, lots of rhinoceros, lions, mammoth, bears. Remember that the ranges of many animal species were different back then so all these animals actually lived in the region at that time.
But the Chauvet artists didn't paint people. There is a half-man-half-bison creature and there is outline of human hands but no depiction of a full human.So, why these precise animals? Why not birds, fish, snakes? Was it for their religion, magic or sheer beauty? We don't know, but whatever it was, it was worth it to them to spend hours deep inside a cave with just a torch between them and utter darkness. So, on that note, let's dim the lights, so we can see these slides and actually look at the techniques they used.
简析：
Chauvet Cave 乔维特洞穴 大概是目前发现的在法国地区的最古老的洞穴，它的古老程度甚至超过了Altamira 和 Lascaux，这个洞穴最有意思的是它的壁画。它的壁画的杰作程度甚至能让你以为它根本就不属于旧石器时代的那种原始时代。该洞穴的壁画大型凶猛陆上动物居多，唯独没有鸟类、鱼、蛇之类的，考古学家都对这种精确得只画凶猛的犀牛、狮子、猛犸象之类的这种行为表示好奇。
另外，这个洞穴其实并不住人，所以考古学家也不理解为什么要把壁画画在这种难以发现的隐蔽地方，它既不是作为庇护所一样的地方，也没有人类居住过的痕迹。很有意思的是，洞穴壁上的碳痕能证明之后还是有人来参过这个洞穴的，当然也是很久以前的事情了。
不熟悉的单词：
- Chauvet Cave 乔维特洞穴
- pipe up 开始（大声）讲话
- primitive 原始
- masterpieces 杰作
- Altamira 阿尔塔米拉
- Lascaux 拉斯科
- inhabited 有人居住
- penetrate 渗透;穿过;进入
- torches 火把
- charcoal 木炭
- Paleolithic artists 旧石器时代的艺术家
- speculate 推测
- enhancing 增强
- vitality 活力
- slides 幻灯片
- depicts 描绘
- herbivores 食草动物
- deer 鹿
- bison 野牛
- rhinoceros 犀牛
- mammoth 猛犸象
- outline 勾勒…的外形
- depiction 描绘;描画;描写;描述;刻画
- precise 精确的
- sheer 完全的;纯粹的;十足的;陡峭的
- sheer beauty 纯粹的美
- torch 火炬
- utter 完全的;十足的;彻底的
- dim 使…变弱
- sophisticated 见多识广的;老练的;见过世面的;复杂巧妙的;先进的;精密的;水平高的;在行的
- charcoal mark 炭印
值得注意的表达方式：
- piped up and said 大声说
- the dawn of art 艺术的曙光
- the context of these paintings 这些画的背景
- dim the lights 把灯调暗
- be shown alongside