托福听力题目的考查方向是有规律的，我们把这些规律叫做原则，比如开头原则，强调原则，转折原则，建议原则等，今天我们简要地说一下重复原则的应用。
重复原则，顾名思义，即关注反复重复的词。在主旨题中可以帮助我们做出判断。主旨题中90%以上是在开头呈现的，呈现方式有直接展开和间接展开，比如OK，we’re going to focus on …XY 就是直接展开，我们在选项中定位XY或是XY的同义表达即可。间接展开则是在开头讲故事或是较长的例子，然后说出主旨。这类文章我们需要关注反复重复的词或词组(尤其是专有名词)的解释，再强调一下，是词的解释，而不是重复的词本身，通常选项会避免出现原词，而以词的解释形式出现，考查你对概念的理解。
例如：
Ok, the next kind of animal behavior I want to talk about might be familiar to
you. You may have seen, for example, a bird that’s in the middle of a mating
ritual, and suddenly it stops and preens, you know, takes a few moments to
straighten its feathers, and then returns to the mating ritual. This kind of
behavior, this doing something that seems completely out of place, is what we
call a ‘Displacement Activity’. Displacement activities are activities that
animal’s engaging in when they have conflicting drives. If we take our
example from a minute ago, if the bird is afraid of its mate, it’s conflicted. It
wants to mate but it’s also afraid and wants to run away. So, instead, it starts
grooming itself. So, the displacement activity, the grooming, the straightening
of its feathers, seems to be an irrelevant behavior. So, what do you think
another example of a displacement activity might be?
这篇文章的开头段没有直接说主旨，而是在举例之后说出主旨---displacement activities，并且后面重复了三次，所以是key words。
题目：
What is the lecture mainly about?
A. Methods of observing unusual animal behavior.
B. A theory about ways birds attract mates.
C. Ways animals behave when they have conflicting drives.
D. Criteria for classifying animal behaviors.
没有任何一个选项有displacement activities，我们要关注的是它的解释---(原文画下划线的部分)-- Displacement activities are activities that animal’s engaging in when they have conflicting drives. 解释中的关键词是 engage， conflicting drives，因此答案是C选项，其中engage同义转换成behave。
因此，我们在听到反复重复的词时，不必细究词本身，仅用缩写在笔记中标注即可，但一定要记下这个词的解释当中的关键词，从而准确定位正确选项。