Passage 1

  A linguist is always listening, never off-duty. I invited a group of friends round to my house, telling them that I was going to record their speech. I said I was interested in their regional accents, and that it would take only a few minutes. Thus one evening, three people turned up at my house and were shown into my front room. When they saw the room they were a bit alarmed, for it was laid out as a studio.( 工作室 ) In front of each easy chair, there was a microphone at head height, with wires leading to a tape recorder in the middle of the floor. They sat down, and I explained that all I wanted was for them to count from 1 to 20. Then we could relax and have a drink.

  I turned on the tape-recorder and each in turn counted from 1 to 20 in their best accents. When it was over, I turned the tape-recorder off and brought round the drinks. For the rest of the evening there was general jolly conversation — spoilt only by the fact that I had to take a telephone call in another room, which unfortunately lasted some time.

  As a matter of fact, the microphones were not connected to the tape-recorder in the middle of the room at all but to another one in the kitchen. The participants, having seen the visible tape-recorder turned off, paid no more attention to the microphone which stayed in front of their chairs, only a few inches from their mouths, thus giving excellent sound quality. And my lengthy absence meant that I was able to obtain as natural a piece of conversation as it would be possible to find.

  Of course, I did tell my friends what had happened to them after the event was over and gave them the option of destroying the tape. But none of them wanted to.

31.The linguist asked his friends to count from one to twenty because      .