Utter rot. Then why don't they pay professional actors or speakers to record the tapes.

Posting that my post is 'utter rot' without supporting your assertion is merely your opinion without foundation.

I can't answer your question as I don't know whomever they hired. That said, they might well have been professional speakers or actors. How do YOU know they weren't?

Were I a carpenter by trade, and you asked me to make something out of wood using a BLUNT chisel, I wouldn't be able to do it well. Why the hell can't an English textbook for Chinese middle school pupils be written with few, if any, errors in it? Especially when it was co-authored by laowai. I'm sure there are more than the few mistakes in it that I happened to discover. You see, I didn't read every page, and what I did read was not read with the purpose of spotting errors. Publishing such a flawed textbook for mandatory use in countless senior middle schools located across the length and breadth of China was an utterly disgraceful deed! That's my conclusion, and I'm sticking to it.