50-53題為題組
A linguist is always listening, never off-duty. Once I invited a group of friends round to my house, telling them that I was going to record their speech. I said I was interested in their regional accents, and that it would take only a few minutes. Thus, on one evening, three people turned up at my house and were shown into my front room. When they saw the room they were a bit alarmed, for it was laid out as a studio. In front of each easy chair there was a microphone at head height, with wires leading to a tape-recorder in the middle of the floor. They sat down, rather nervously, and I explained that all I wanted was for them to count from one to twenty. Then we could relax and have a drink.
I turned on the tape-recorder and each in turn solemnly counted from one to twenty in their best accent. When it was over, I turned the tape-recorder off and brought round the drinks. I was sternly criticized for having such an idiotic job, and for the rest of the evening there was general jolly conversation—spoilt only by the fact that I had to take a telephone call in another room, which unfortunately lasted some time.
Or at least that was how it would appear. For, of course, the microphones were not connected to the tape-recorder in the middle of the room at all but to another one, which was turning happily away in the kitchen. The participants, having seen the visible tape-recorder turned off, paid no more attention to the microphones which stayed in front of their chairs, only a few inches from their mouths, thus giving excellent sound quality. And my lengthy absence meant that I was able to obtain as natural a piece of conversation as it would be possible to find.
I should add, perhaps, that I did tell my friends what had happened to them, after the event was over, and gave them the option of destroying the tape. None of them wanted to—though for some years afterwards I was left in no doubt that I was morally obliged to them, in the sense that it always seemed to be my round when it came to the buying of drinks. Linguistic research can be a very expensive business. 【題組】53. How did his friends react when the author told them what he had done?
(A) They wanted him to destroy the recordings he had made.
(B) They didn’t really feel offended.
(C) They were upset because they felt he had cheated them.
(D) They made him pay them for the recordings.
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