Listening audioscript

1.WHY DOES THE STUDENT GO TO SEE THE LAB ASSISTANT? 
2. LISTEN AGAIN TO PART OF THE PASSAGE. THEN ANSWER THE 
QUESTION. 
 (Student)
Do we need to work in the lab in a group? 
(Professor)
Yes. 
(Student)
And work with the exact group members we were assigned?  
(Professor)
 
Is there a problem with your group? 
WHY DOES THE LAB ASSISTANT ANSWER THE STUDENT’S QUESTION 
WITH THIS QUESTION: 
 (Professor)
 Is there a problem with your group? 
3. WHAT DOES THE LAB ASSISTANT SUGGEST THAT THE GROUP 
SHOULD TRY? 
4. LISTEN AGAIN TO PART OF THE PASSAGE. THEN ANSWER THE 
QUESTION. 

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LPREP IBT 3 E AudioScript 
101
 (Student)
OK, I’ll see if I can get my group to try that, but it’ll probably take my 
group several hours even to decide when to meet, besides actually 
figuring out what we’re going to do during the lab session. 
HOW DOES THE STUDENT SEEM TO FEEL ABOUT HIS GROUP?
5. WHAT DOES THE LAB ASSISTANT SAY ABOUT THE LAB REPORT? 
 
Page 382
[ mp3 160-161]
 
Questions 6 through 11. 
Listen to a lecture in an American literature class. 
(Professor) 
Continuing our discussion of different genres of American literature, 
today we’ll be discussing historical fiction. Historical fiction is a kind of 
fiction that tries to portray a certain time period or historical event while 
adding to or altering the facts to create a storyline. Often the historical 
event is told through the eyes of a fictional character, and sometimes the 
historical facts are altered to improve the storyline.
 
 
Now, we should distinguish here from general fiction, as well as the 
genre of alternate history. With both of these genres, the historical 
events in the story are significantly altered. With non-historical fiction, 
the events may be totally invented or take place in an alternate reality, as 
with science fiction. With alternate history, in contrast, the events take 
place in this reality, but some historical events have been altered. That 
is, the stories may be about actual historical people and events, but what 
happens in the stories does not correspond to actual historical facts. 


Um 
with historical fiction, every effort is made by the writer to be 
accurate about actual historical events, and often the author conducts a 
fair amount of research to be as accurate as possible. The big difference 
here is that the um main characters are often invented and motivations 
and feelings of the characters, including the historical persons, are often 
dramatized. OK, so today I’d like to discuss one of the finest examples 
of historical American fiction: um the Little House series of books written 
by Laura Ingalls Wilder. 
How many of you are familiar with this series of books? Hmm…or maybe 
some of you are familiar with the television series that was based on 
it…although since that was the 1970’s and 80’s, maybe you’re not. 
The 
Little House 
books began as a record of the stories Pa told Laura 
when she was little. When her first book, Little House in the Big Woods, 
was a success, Laura Wilder was asked to write a series of stories, not 
the history, of her childhood. The book takes place in the late 1860’s, 
though it was published in 1932. 
The point I want you to understand clearly is that the incidents in Laura 
Wilder’s books are basically true, but Laura purposefully did not tell the 
whole truth. She wanted to write books that she felt were appropriate for 
children, so what she did was to leave out events and to replace the 
names of people that were not presented positively. Um an example of 
an event that Laura omitted because it was unpleasant was the life of the 
fourth Ingalls child. The fourth child was a boy, a boy named Charles 
Fredrick Ingalls, who died before his first birthday; the life of this child 

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was omitted from her books, since Laura didn’t feel it would be 
appropriate for a children’s book. Um another example shows how Laura 
changed the names of people portrayed in a bad light. Um Nellie Olsen 
was a character in the book rather than a real person. This character was 
based on a composite of two girls in Plum Creek, Nellie Owens and 
Ginny Masters, two girls who caused Laura and her sister Mary a lot of 
trouble. Laura didn’t want to use the real names of these… 
uh…bothersome girls in her books, so she changed them and attributed 
their actions to one character. 
Um from these examples, we can see that one of the ways that Laura 
made her stories more appropriate for children was to make her stories a 
little more pleasant than her life had actually been. Um another technique 
she used to make her stories more appropriate was to simplify the 
storylines to make the story easier to follow. For instance, Laura altered 
the description of the moves that her family actually made, for the sake of 
simplicity. In real life, the Ingalls family moved from the Big Woods in 
Wisconsin, to Missouri, then to the Indian Territory, back to the Big 
Woods, and finally to Minnesota. In the Little House books, Laura 
recorded the Ingalls moving from the Big Woods to Indian Territory and 
then to Minnesota. There are many other such details and events that 
Laura felt were not appropriate for children. These changes are what 
move her work from the genre of autobiography to the genre of historical 
fiction. 
So, um to summarize, although the Little House books record true 
historical events as they happened, the series is considered historical 
fiction rather than autobiography because Laura Wilder omitted events 
and altered names to improve the storyline and make her books 
appropriate for her readers.