Part 4. Short talks on listening skills.

Listen to the short talk entitled "Be careful with numbers".

Some important words are taken away from the written passage.

Supply the missing words.

Be careful with numbers.

Quick and accurate response to numbers is very important in daily communication.

Telephone numbers, addresses, prices, temperatures, time and dates are all closely linked with the use of numbers.

Besides, numbers also play a very important part in broadcast programs such as scientific stories, statistics update and reports about ongoing events of various kinds.

Although identification of numbers in print is usually easy.

Number identification through listening proves to be a big problem for many people.

In actual listening, we are often required to get the numbers immediately after we hear them.

And failure to get a correct number, sometimes a mere mistake in digit, can seriously affect the understanding of the whole story, and therefore cause severe losses.

The differences between million and billion, "-teen's" and "-ty's" are so great that no one can simply afford to ignore them.

Numbers are sometimes read in different ways.

For example, "seventeen point five million" or "seventeen million five hundred thousand" can also be read as "seventeen and one half million".

Intensive training in numbers can help us get familiar with these different yet still regular ways of numbers presentations.

For easy reading and writing, numbers of more than four digits are often separated by commas into group of three digits each.

For example, "1,234,567" is one million, two hundred and thirty four thousand and five hundred and sixty seven.

Saying numbers over to yourselves after you hear them can increase our sensitivity to numbers.

Numbers are all around us.

Let us practice with numbers and learn to be good at numbers.