[ti:Lesson5]
[ar:新概念3]
[al:LRC之家]

[00:00.13]LRC之家製作,i162.com
[00:02.43]Lesson 5
[00:03.88]The facts
[00:05.68]Listen to the tape then answer the question below.
[00:10.24]What was the consequence of the editor's insistence on facts and statistics?
[00:15.99]Editors of newspapers and magazines often go to extremes to provide their reader with unimportant facts and statistics.
[00:27.04]Last year a journalist had been instructed by a well-known magazine
[00:31.79]to write an article on the president's palace in a new African republic.
[00:37.80]When the article arrived,
[00:40.28]the editor read the first sentence and then refuse to publish it.
[00:44.89]The article began:
[00:47.66]'Hundreds of steps lead to the high wall which surrounds the president's palace'.
[00:53.14]The editor at once sent the journalist a fax
[00:57.74]instructing him find out the exact number of steps and the height of the wall.
[01:04.20]The journalist immediately set out to obtain these important facts,
[01:09.73]but the took a long time to send them
[01:12.92]Meanwhile, the editor was getting impatient,
[01:16.20]for the magazine would soon go to press.
[01:20.16]He sent the journalist two more faxes,
[01:23.04]but received no reply.
[01:26.19]He sent yet another fax informing the journalist that if he did not reply soon he would be fired.
[01:33.24]When the journalist again failed to reply,
[01:37.79]the editor reluctantly published the article as it had originally been written.
[01:43.61]A week later,
[01:45.71]the editor at last received a fax from the journalist.
[01:49.41]Not only had the poor man been arrested, but he had been sent to prison as well.
[01:56.07]However, he had at last been allowed to send a fax
[02:00.17]in which he informed the editor that
[02:03.00]the he had been arrested while counting the 1,084 steps
[02:07.83]leading to the fifteen-foot wall which surrounded the president's palace.