First Listening
Please listen to a short passage carefully and prepare to answer some questions.
The United States is a land stirred by spiritual dreams and shaped by the realities of its materialism.
As to spiritual dreams, they are more or less based on puritanical beliefs such as pursuit of simplicity, utility and perfection. Consequently, even blue jeans, which used to be physical workers' working wear, became a universally accepted classless fashion. Perhaps no other item from American consumer culture has been filled with so much history and meaning as blue jeans. A simple pair of pants has linked nineteenth-century gold miners to nonconformist youths of the 1950s and to high fashion models of today. However, the realities of American materialism often shatter the spiritual dreams by driving people into the abyss of commercialization, where they are forced to change their spiritual capital into short-lived possession of material junk.
Second Listening
Listen to the tape again. Then answer the following questions.
1. In what way do spiritual dreams link to puritanical beliefs?
2. Have Americans worked out their democracy further in regard to clothes than anything else?
3. What does "material junk" mean? Why is it short-lived?
