TOEFL iBT Listening Practice Test 1

Transcript (revealed after you submit) PROFESSOR: Let’s turn now to a subject that shaped almost every major city in the world: the public park. Today we take parks for granted. They seem like an obvious feature of any city. But the idea of setting aside large areas of open, green land specifically for the enjoyment of ordinary citizens is actually fairly recent, and it grew out of a very particular set of problems. To understand why parks were created, we have to go back to the nineteenth century, during the Industrial Revolution. Cities were growing at an astonishing rate. People moved from the countryside to work in factories, and urban populations exploded. But this rapid growth came at a cost. Housing was crowded, the air was thick with smoke from coal, and there was very little clean, open space. Disease spread easily in these cramped conditions. Reformers began to argue that cities needed what they called the lungs of the city, open green spaces where people could breathe fresh air and escape the noise and dirt. One of the most famous examples is Central Park in New York City. In the eighteen fifties, New York was booming, but it had almost no public green space. A landscape architect named Frederick Law Olmsted, along with his partner Calvert Vaux, won a competition to design the park. What many people don’t realize is that Central Park is almost entirely artificial. The rolling hills, the winding paths, the lakes, even the placement of individual trees, all of it was carefully planned and constructed. Workers moved enormous amounts of soil and rock, and planted hundreds of thousands of trees and shrubs. It looks natural, but it is really a work of art disguised as nature. Olmsted had a strong philosophy about what a park should do. He believed that being surrounded by peaceful, natural scenery could calm the mind and improve people’s health and behavior. Importantly, he designed his parks to be democratic. That is, he wanted them to be open to everyone, rich and poor alike. In an era when cities were sharply divided by class, a public park was a rare place where people from all backgrounds could share the same space. Olmsted’s ideas spread rapidly. He and his firm went on to design parks in many other cities, and his influence can be seen around the world. But I want you to notice something about the underlying logic here. The park was not just decoration. It was seen as a tool, a way to solve social problems, to improve public health, and even to make people better citizens. Whether or not parks fully achieved those goals is a question we’ll return to next week. For now, remember this: when you walk through a city park, you are walking through a nineteenth-century solution to a nineteenth-century problem, one that turned out to be so successful that we can hardly imagine a city without it.