Intergrated Task

[2219156]

I also give reading and listening passage this time.
I wonder whether you can help check my work meet Toefl's requirement.
Thank you very much, Kidosdad. ^_^

Reading

Private collectors have been selling and buying fossils, the petrified remains of ancient organisms, ever since the eighteenth century. In recent years, however, the sale of fossils, particularly of dinosaurs and other large vertebrate has grown into a big business. Rare and important fossils are now being sold to private owner ship for millions of dollars. This is an unfortunate development for both scientists and the general public.
The public suffers because fossils that would otherwise be donated to museums where everyone can see them are sold to private collectors who do not allow the public to view their collections. Making it harder for the public to see fossils can lead to a decline in public interest in fossils, which would be a pity.
More importantly, scientists are likely to lose access to some of the most important fossils and thereby miss out on potentially crucial discoveries about extinct life forms. Wealthy fossil buyers with a desire to own the rarest and most important fossils can spend virtually limitless amounts of money to acquire them. Scientists and the museums and universities they work for often cannot compete successfully for fossils against millionaire fossil buyers.
Moreover, commercial fossil collectors often destroy valuable scientific evidence associated with the fossil they unearth. Most commercial fossil collectors are untrained or uninterested in carrying out the careful field work and documentation that reveal the most about animal life in the past. For example, scientists have learned about the biology of nest-building dinosaurs called oviraptors by carefully observing the exact position of oviraptor fossils in the ground and the presence of other fossils in the immediate surroundings. Commercial fossil collectors typically pay no attention to how fossils lie in the ground or to the smaller fossils that may surround bigger ones.

Listening

Of course there are some negative consequences of selling fossils in the commercial market, but they’ve been greatly exaggerated. The benefits of commercial fossil trade greatly outweigh the disadvantages.
First of all, the public is likely to have greater exposure to fossils as a result of commercial fossil trade, not less exposure. Commercial fossil hunting makes a lot of fossils available for purchase. And as a result, even low-level public institutions, like public schools and libraries, cannot routinely by interesting fossils and display them for the public.
As for the idea that scientists will lose access to really important fossils, that’s not realistic, either. Before anyone can put value on a fossil, it needs to be scientifically identified, right? Well, the only people who can identify fossils, who can really tell what given fossil is or isn’t, are scientists. By performing detail examinations in tests on the fossils themselves. So even if a fossil’s destined to go to a private collector, it has to pass through the hands of scientific experts first. This way, the scientific community is not gonna miss out on anything important that’s out there.
Finally, whatever damage commercial fossil collectors sometimes do, if it weren’t for them, many fossils would simply go undiscovered, because there aren’t that many fossil collecting corporations that run by university and other scientific institutions. Isn’t it better for scientists to at least have more fossils being found, even if we don’t have all the scientific data we would like to have about their locations and surroundings than is it to have many fossils go completely undiscovered?
The reading and listening are talking about whether fossils business benefits scientists and general public. The reading believes it has negative impact. While the listening points out that it is a fortunate development.

My work
First, the reading passage mentions that because private collectors own a lot of fossils, public can hardly see fossils which causes public's interest to fossils decline. However, the listening points out that since the market is big, many fossils are available. Even school and other institutions can buy fossils to exhibit them public. That makes public have more chance to see fossils.

Second, the reading indicates that scientists may lose opportunities to see important fossils because wealthy buyers purchase them. But the listening says that it is scientists who first examine details of fossils in texts to show whether those fossils are important or not. So scientist would not miss any important fossils.

Third, the reading believes that for most collectors are not trained well or not dealing with fossils carefully, they may damage important scientific evidence. The listening material believes that since universities and other scientific institutions do not have enough ability to discover all fossils, it is better to uncover those fossils by others rather than leaving them underground undiscovered. Universities and other scientific institutions do not have enough ability to discover all fossils, even though untrained collectors may cause same damage to fossils.

TOEFL listening lectures: What is the professor's opinion of Ragwort?

[Kitosdad]