Section B  Audio-visual Tasks

Task3  Spot Dictation

        Listen to a passage three times and while listening, you are to put the missing word in each numbered blank according to what you hear. 

         An American medical team performed the first (1) successful organ transplant on December 23rd, 1954. The operation took place at what is nowBrigham and (2) Women’sHospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

The patient, Richard Herrick, was dying from akidney (3) infection.Dr. Joseph Murray led the team that gave Richard a kidney from his twinbrother, Ronald. Ronald had the same (4) genes as Richard, but was in excellent health.Richard survived for eight more years with the kidney. In (5) 1990,Dr. Murray was given the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work.

(6) Experts say the first transplant operation was carried out in 1823. A German doctor (7) placed skin from a woman’s leg on her nose. By1863, a French scientist showed that the body (8) rejectstissue transplants from one person to another. Forty years later, a German scientist found that this rejection was carried out by the body’s (9) defense system attacking the foreign tissue.

Rejection continued to be a problem well into the20th century. In 1958, French doctor Jean Dausset discovered a system fortissue (10) matching.This is a way to make sure that the tissue to be transplanted is as similar aspossible to the patient’s own tissue.

In 1972, (11) Swiss scientist Jean Borel discovered that the drug cyclosporine could stop the body from rejecting the new organ or tissue.Cyclosporine was (12) approvedfor use in the United States in 1983. Experts say the use of this drug is the most important (13) reasonfor the success of transplant operations today.

Doctors around the world now can save thousands oflives with transplant operations. American (14) officials say a record number of organ transplants were performed in the United States last year. Nearly 27,000 people (15) receivedone or more organs. These people can be expected to survive for many years.