PTE考生目前最大的问题之一就是练习题缺乏。除了有限的基本官方书（PLUS，Testbuilder, OG）之外，就没有题了。很多英语基础不是很扎实的同学很难找到练习材料。墨尔本文波雅思PTE培训学校专门为墨尔本，悉尼PTE考生准备了适合PTE听力阅读练习的科学60秒。各位PTE同学可以练习PTE听力中的summarise spoken text和PTE口语中的retell lecture，练习记笔记技巧和复述。废话少说，下面开始：
60秒科学：Google Searches Linked to Stock Market Moves
听力内容：
60秒科学节目（SSS）是科学美国人网站的一套广播栏目，英文名称：Scientific American – 60 Second Science,节目内容以科学报道为主，节目仅一分钟的时间，主要对当今的科学技术新发展作以简明、通俗的介绍，对于科学的发展如何影响人们的生活环境、健康状况及科学技术，提供了大量简明易懂的阐释。
Wanna know what the most popular movies, albums and video games are? Ask the internet. But don’t Google it. Check what other people Googled. That’s the theory behind Google Flu Trends°™which crunches search data to forecast flu prevalence. With admittedly mixed results.
Nevertheless, researchers have applied the idea to the stock market. They found that when searches related to business and politics go up, the market tends to take a dive. Queries for words like “election,” “senate,” and “CEO” are predictive of the downward trend°™but not terms like “church,” “earthquake” and “geometry.”
Why the correlation? The researchers say investors and the public may be more likely to search for information on business and government when they’re concerned about the economy. And if confidence in the economy drops, so might stock prices. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Chester Curme et al, Quantifying the semantics of search behavior before stock market moves]
Over time, the correlation weakened°™a sign that traders may already be using Internet search data in automated trading algorithms.
“Generally speaking, if an opportunity like this is known, then the effect will diminish, and that’s what we think we’re seeing in the data we looked at, from 2004 to 2012.” Lead author Chester Curme, a research fellow at the Warwick Business School.
And before you head over to Google Trends, he says, keep this in mind: “If somebody knows that other traders use this method, then a predatory trader could manipulate search volumes on Google artificially in order to deceive other traders.” As they say in the biz: past performance does not guarantee future results.
-Christopher Intagliata
