二、案例分析
下面是一个人文学的经典案例:
TPO 6 Lecture 1 (Boom and Bust)
听力原文:
1)… Of course, booms aren’t always followed by busts. We’ve certainly seen times when local economies expanded rapidly for a while and then went back to a normal pace of growth. But, there’s a type of rapid expansion, what might be called the hysterical or irrational boom that pretty much always leads to a bust. See, people often create and intensify a boom when they get carried away by some new industry that seems like it will make them lots of money fast. You’d think that by the 90s, people would have learned from the past. If they did, well, look at tulips.
Q: What is the main purpose of the talk?
A. to show what happens after an economy has experienced a boom-and-bust cycle
B. to illustrate the conditions needed to produce a boom-and-bust cycle
C. to demonstrate how boom-and-bust cycles have changed over time
D. to explain why the boom-and-bust cycle is not a frequent historical occurrence
2) … It turns out that the Netherlands was an ideal country for growing tulips. It had the right kind of sandy soil for one thing, but also, ⑴ it was a wealthy nation with a growing economy, willing to spend lots of money on new exotic things. Plus, the Dutch had a history of gardening. ⑵ Wealthy people would compete, spending enormous amounts of money to buy the rarest flowers for their gardens. What happened then was a craze for these specialized tulips. We called that craze ‘tulip-mania’. So, here we’ve got all the conditions for an irrational boom: ⑶ a prospering economy, so more people had more disposable income - money to spend on luxuries, but they weren’t experienced at investing their new wealth. Then along comes a thrilling new commodity. Sure the first specimens were just plain ordinary tulips, but they could be bred into some extraordinary variations, like that dark purple tulip. And finally, ⑷ you have an unregulated marketplace, no government constraints, where price could explode.
Q: What were some of the factors that contributed to the tulip craze in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century? Click on three choices.
① wealthy gardeners liked to complete for rare plants
② the number of people with disposable income was growing
③ tulip bulbs were initially cheap and easy to obtain
④ tulips in the wild bloomed in unusual color combination
⑤ the tulip market was not regulated by the government