(N): Listen to a talk given by a professor.

(W): Welcome to Biology 101. I’m Professor Martin, and this is your laboratory assistant, Peter Smith. This course meets twice a week for lecture and once a week for laboratory assignments. The text for this course is Introduction to Biological Sciences, by Abramson. You should get the text and read the first chapter before the next class. You will also need to get the laboratory manual that accompanies the text. I’ve passed out a copy of the course syllabus. This syllabus lists the reading assignments and exam dates. Note that we will cover one chapter a week for each of the next fifteen weeks in the semester, and there will be three exams throughout the course. Grades in this course are based on your exam grades and your grades on the laboratory assignments. Are there any questions?

(N): Listen to a lecture given by a professor.

(M): In yesterday’s class, we discussed the volcanoes located in the area known as the Ring of Fire, an area which basically encircles the Pacific and includes the United States’s Mount St. Helens as well as Japan’s Mt. Fuji and Argentina’s Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. Most of the world’s approximately 500 active volcanoes are located along the Ring of Fire, and the eruptions that take place there are among the most violent in the world. Today, we are going to discuss the vol-canoes of Hawaii, which are quite dif-ferent from the volcanoes in the Ring of Fire. Hawaiian volcanoes are not located along the Ring of Fire and are therefore not caused by the movement of the Earth’s plates against each other. Instead, Hawaii is located in the middle of the Ring of Fire, above a massive plate rather than where two plates meet. The result is that Hawaiian volcanoes are much gentler than those in the Ring of Fire: Hawaiian volcanoes have much less gas in them, which causes less explosive eruptions, and the lava in Hawaiian volcanoes is thinner, which results in mounds that are long and low rather than high and steep because the lava flows farther and builds mounds gradually with long, low slopes. Mauna Loa, the name of one of Hawaii’s most famous volcanoes, actually means “long mountain.”

(N): Listen to a talk about the Smithsonian.

(W): I hope you’ve enjoyed your visit so far in Washington, D.C. Today, we’re going on a tour of the Smithsonian, The Smithsonian is actually several museums, each with a different focus, situated together on a mall. These museums in total have more than sixty million items on exhibit. The first Smithsonian museum we’ll visit is the Museum of Natural History, which has various types of stuffed animals, and exhibits showing the lifestyles of early American Indians and Eskimos. From the Museum of Natural History, we’ll go on to the National Air and Space Museum, where we’ll see dis-plays that show the development of flight. In this museum you can see the airplane that Orville Wright used to make his first flight and the airplane that Charles Lindbergh used to cross the Adantic. After we visit those two museums as a group, you’ll have free time to visit some of the other Smithsonian museums: the Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, and the various art museums located on the Smithsonian Mall. After our trip to the Smithsonian today, we’ll go on to the White House and Capitol Building tomorrow.