Section A  Word Bank

In this section you will listento a short passageabout some stories of successful people. The following words and phrases may be of some help.

Task One: Focusing on the Main Ideas

Choose the best answer to complete each of the following sentences according to the information contained in the listening passage.

 Task Two: Zooming In on the Details

Listen to the recording again and fill in each of the blanks according to what you have heard.

Script

    If you read the life stories of many of the world’s most successful people, you will find that their early careers are littered with failures. Here are a few typical examples.

     Albert Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. However, he wasn’t always considered a “genius”. He didn’t speak until he was four, and couldn’t read until he was seven. His teachers and parents thought he was slow, so he was expelled from school and couldn’t get into the Zurich Polytechnic School. He later famously said, “Success is failure in progress.”

     Van Gogh is one of the most famous and influential painters in the history of Western Art. He is renowned for paintings such as The Starry Night and Sunflowers. However, during his lifetime, Van Gogh sold only one painting for a very small amount of money. Despite this, he carried on painting, sometimes even going without food to complete his collection of over 800 known works.

   Abraham Lincoln was one of America’s greatest leaders, taking the country through the Civil War. However, his life was never easy. He started numerous businesses that failed, went bankrupt twice, and was defeated in 26 campaigns for public office. He later said, “My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”

     J. K. Rowling is the author of Harry Potter. Before publishing the book, she was penniless, depressed, and trying to raise her child on her own. In a speech at Harvard in 2008, she said: “I had failed so greatly. After a short-lived marriage, I was jobless, a lone parent, as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain. The fears that my parent had had for me, and the fears that I had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard I was the biggest failure I knew.”

     So when you are in the face of adversity, you need patience to persist in the pursuit of your dream. You can use your setbacks as learning experiences and make them stepping stones to future success. They will pay off in the future.