托福综合写作考察考生的综合能力，需要大家多研究一下历年的TPO真题，针对题型和考察点好好备考。下面，北京新航道托福频道为大家奉上TPO12综合写作阅读和听力文本，一起去看看吧。GO!

　　TPO12

　　Reading

　　A recent study reveals that people especially young people are reading far less literature—novels, plays, and poems—than they used to. This is troubling because the trend has unfortunate effects for the reading public, for culture in general, and for the future of literature itself.

　　While there has been a decline in book reading generally, the decline has been especially sharp for literature. This is unfortunate because nothing else provides the intellectual stimulation that literature does. Literature encourages us to exercise our imaginations, empathize with others, and expand our understanding of language. So by reading less literature, the reading public is missing out on important benefits.

　　Unfortunately, missing out on the benefits of literature is not the only problem. What are people reading instead? Consider the prevalence of self-help books on lists of best sellers. These are usually superficial poorly written, and intellectually undemanding. Additionally, instead of sitting down with a challenging novel, many persons are now more likely to turn on the television, watch a music video, or read a Web page. Clearly, diverting time previously spent in reading literature to trivial forms of entertainment has lowered the level of culture in general.

　　The trend of reading less literature is all the more regrettable because it is taking place during a period when good literature is being written. There are many talented writers today, but they lack an audience. This fact is bound to lead publishers to invest less in literature and so support fewer serious writers. Thus, the writing as well as the reading of literature is likely to decline because of the poor standards of today's readers.

　　Listening

　　Professor:

　　It is often said that people are reading less literature today than they used to. What should of this?

　　Well first, a book doesn't have to be literature to be intellectually stimulating. Science writing history, political analysis and so forth aren't literature perhaps, but they are often of high quality and these kinds of books can be just as creative and well-written as a novel or a play They can stimulate the imagination. So don't assume that someone who isn't reading literature isn’t reading a good book.

　　But let's say that people aren't just spending less time with literature, they are also spending less time with books in general. Does that mean that the cultures is in decline? No, there's plenty of culturally valuable material that isn't written - music and movies, for example. Are people wasting their time when they listen to a brilliant song or watch a good movie? Do these non-literary activities lower cultural standards? Of course not. Culture has changed. In today's culture, there are many forms of expression available other than novels and poems. And some of these creative forms speak more directly to contemporary concerns than literature does.

　　Finally, it's probably true that there's less support for literature today than in earlier generations.来源：北京新航道托福培训

　　But don't be too quick to blame the readers. Sometimes it's the author's faults. Let's be honest. A lot of modern literature is intended to be difficult to understand. Here is not much reason to suppose that earlier generations of readers would have read a lot of today's literature either.

　　Reading

　　Jane Austen (1775-1817) is one of the most famous of all English novelists, and today her novels are more popular than ever, with several recently adapted as Hollywood movies. But we do not have many records of what she looked like. For a long time, the only accepted image of Austen was an amateur sketch of an adult Austen made by her sister Cassandra. However recently a professionally painted, full-length portrait of a teenage girl owned by a member of the Austen family has come up for sale. Although the professional painting is not titled Jane Austen, there are good reasons to believe she is the subject.

　　First, in 1882, several decades after Austen's death, Austen's family gave permission to use the portrait as an illustration in an edition of her letters. Austen's family clearly recognized it as a portrait of the author. So, for over a century now, the Austen family itself has endorsed the claim that the girl in the portrait is Jane Austen.

　　Second, the face in the portrait clearly resembles the one in Cassandra's sketch, which we know depicts Austen. Though somewhat amateurish, the sketch communicates definite details about Austen's face. Even though the Cassandra sketch is of an adult Jane Austen, the features are still similar to those of the teenage girl in the painting. The eyebrows, nose, mouth, and overall shape of the face are very much like those in the full-length portrait.

　　Third, although the painting is unsigned and undated, there is evidence that it was painted when Austen was a teenager. The style links it to Ozias Humphrey, a society portrait painter who was the kind of professional the wealthy Austen family would hire. Humphrey was active in the late 1780s and early 1790s, exactly the period when Jane Austen was the age of the girl in the painting.

　　Listening

　　Professor:

　　The evidence linking this portrait to Jane Austen is not at all convincing. Sure, the painting has long been somewhat loosely connected to Austen's extended family and their descendents, but this hardly proves it's a portrait of Jane Austen as a teenager. The reading's arguments that the portrait is of Austen are questionable at best.

　　First, when the portrait was authorized for use in the 1882 publication of her letters, Jane Austen had been dead for almost 70 years. So the family members who asserted that the painting was Jane had never actually seen her themselves. They couldn't have known for certain if the portrait was of Austen or not.

　　Second, the portrait could very well be that of a relative of Austen's, a fact that would explain the resemblance between its subject and that of Cassandra's sketch. The extended Austen family was very large and many of Jane Austen's female cousins were teenagers in the relevant period or had children who were teenagers. And some of these teenage girls could have resembled Jane Austen. In fact, many experts believe that the true subject of the portrait was one of those relatives, Marianne Kempian, who was a distant niece of Austen's.

　　Third, the painting has been attributed to Humphrey only because of the style. But other evidence points to a later date. A stamp on the back of the picture indicates that the blank canvas, you know the actual piece of cloth on which the picture was painted, was sold by a man named William Legg. Record showed that William Legg did not sell canvases in London when Jane Austen was a teenager. He only started selling canvases when she was 27 years old. So it looks like the canvas was used for the painting at a time when Austen was clearly older than the girl in the portrait.

　　上面就是托福TPO12综合写作阅读和听力文本，通过阅读他们，提取题目要点，找好论点论据，创作出一篇的托福写作文章，预祝各位考生都能取得好成绩。

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