You can study the English language for years and still not understand a native speaker of English when you meet one. Many language leaners know that native speakers say a lot of things that you can’t find in a dictionary. Well, here’s a secret for you: A lot of British people can’t understand each other either!
Across the UK, a number of regions have different dialects—that is, they have their own unique vocabulary and grammatical phrases. There are many different accents in London, because it is not just where a person is born in the UK that decides their accent. Language and accents also vary across social class and level of education. Hence the recent rise of a new accent coined at the end of the 20th century—“Multicultural London English”.
Other factors are also important in the invention of new accents and ways of speaking. These include the influence of people from different ethnic backgrounds and different age groups, too.
“Yoof culture” is an example. The word “yoof” is a slang spelling of “youth”. Young people are creating their own language, concepts and identity. By using words that their parents don’t understand, children can talk about things that their parents might not approve of. For example, instead of saying something like “That’s good!” or “I understand”, yoof will use a single adjective like “Safe!”, or “Sorted!” Besides, Yoof would use “kind-a-thing,” or “sort-a-thing” to replace “if you understand what I’m saying”. In this way, they are starting to find freedom, independence and self-expression.
As learners of English, we may wonder how well we can talk to a native speaker, but perhaps we should worry less about this. Research commissioned by the British Council shows that 94 percent of the English spoken in the world today is spoken among non-native speakers of the language. In fact, when we think about “international English”, there is no such thing as a native or non-native speaker. The UK no longer owns the English language.
1. What’s the function of Paragraph 1?| A．To share a story. | B．To make a comparision. |
| C．To show the author’s experience. | D．To introduce the topic. |
| A．It’s now spoken by people around the world. |
| B．It was invented by Londoners in the 1900s. |
| C．It’s a modern accent that crosses educational divides. |
| D．It’s a dialect specific to a particular social class. |
| A．Watch out. | B．I see. | C．My pleasure. | D．Hurry up. |
| A．Don’t worry if you cannot understand native speakers. |
| B．Learning English well is very easy. |
| C．Languages are always changing. |
| D．It is important to communicate with a native speaker. |
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【推荐1】In modern society, online learning is popular with many people. For many of us, learning a language is a terrifying experience, just as opening a new set of books and CDs.
Babbel is a comprehensive online learning system that allows the user to combine learning with his or her everyday life. Launched in 2007 in Berlin, it’s created and maintained by a team of 300 employees from 28 nations, including linguists, language teachers, native speakers, and authors.
The 14 language courses on offer (including French, Spanish, Polish, German, Swedish and English) are designed to be used on the go, anywhere and at any time, thanks to Babbel’s multi-platform mobile apps. These courses are free to download and contain 2,000—3,000 vocabulary words per language, pronounced by native speakers and accompanied by relevant images.
This native-speaker approach, says Markus Witte, CEO and founder of Babbel, is key to the company’s success. “The courses are designed by experienced language teachers and linguists,” he explains. “Their knowledge about learning processes and language pairings is crucial when designing lessons. We offer 14 learning languages and it makes a huge difference whether a Portuguese or an English native learns Spanish.”
One of the real joys is being able to set your own pace and learn what you want. Simply choose the language you want and start learning it right away with integrated speech recognition.
Registration of Babbel is completely free, as Babbel provides advanced lessons in every language, so you can start making progress immediately. If you choose to sign up, you are offered monthly, three-monthly, six-monthly or yearly payment plans and this gives you immediate access to your chosen language on www. babbel. com as well as via the mobile apps for Android or IOS.
The lessons are quick, bite-sized and entertaining. 50% of Babbel users learn with apps. Witte says, “This mobile language learning supports Babbel’s idea of easy learning. The touch display allows for much faster repeat of vocabulary, and users can check their pronunciation or record a speaking role in a dialogue, which helps to remove the fear of talking in an unfamiliar language.”
1. What do many people think of learning a language?| A．Embarrassing | B．Interesting |
| C． Impressive | D．Unpleasant. |
| A．the courses are easy to download |
| B．the teachers are native speakers |
| C．they can learn at their own pace |
| D．the images are designed by native speakers |
| A．The touch display can help users repeat the words faster. |
| B．Users can only get access to their chosen language via the mobile apps. |
| C．Users are offered only monthly or yearly payment plans |
| D．The mobile language learning is difficult and helpful. |
| A．To illustrate the advantages of online learning. |
| B．To make an advertisement for a language school. |
| C．To introduce a new way of learning foreign languages. |
| D．To discuss how to learn a new language efficiently. |
【推荐2】“How are you” is a nice question. It's a friendly way that people in the United States greet each other. But “How are you?” is also a very unusual question. It's a question that often doesn't have an answer. The person who asks “How are you?” hopes to hear the answer “Fine.”, even if the person's friend isn't fine. The reason is that “How are you?” isn't really a question and “Fine.” isn't really an answer. They are simply other way of saying “Hello!” or “Hi!”.
Sometimes, people also don't say exactly what they mean. For example, when someone asks, “Do you agree?”, the other person might be thinking, “No, I disagree. I think you're wrong…”But it isn't very polite to disagree strongly, so the other person might say “I'm not sure…”. It's a nice way to say that you don't agree with someone.
People also don't say exactly what they are thinking when they finish talking with other people. For example, many talks over the phone finish when one person says “I've to go now.” Often, the person who wants to hang up gives an excuse,” Someone is at the door.” “Something is burning on the stove.” The excuses might be real, or it might not. Perhaps the person who wants to hang up simply doesn't want to talk any more, but it isn't polite to say that. The excuse is more polite, and it doesn't hurt the other person.
When they are greeting each other, talking about an idea, or finishing a talk, people often don't say exactly what they are thinking. It's an important way that people try to be nice to each other, and it's also a part of the game of language.
1. When a person wants to disagree with someone, it is polite to say “ ”.| A．You're wrong. I disagree. | B．I'm not sure. |
| C．I'm sure I disagree. | D．No, I disagree. |
| A．giving an excuse |
| B．hurting someone's feeling |
| C．talking to a person at the door |
| D．going to another place |
| A．Always say what you mean. |
| B．Don't disagree with people. |
| C．Never say exactly what you're thinking. |
| D．Being polite is the best policy. |
【推荐3】In our life most people like green and green is an important color in nature. It is the color of most growing plants. Sometimes, the word green means young, fresh, and growing.
For example, a greenhorn is someone who has no experience, who is new to a situation. In the 15th century, a greenhorn was a young cow or ox whose horns have not yet developed.
About 100 years ago. Greenhorn was a popular expression in the American west.
Someone who has the ability to grow plants well is said to have a green thumb.
A person with green thumb seems to make the plants grow quickly and well. You might say that the woman next door had a green thumb if her garden continues to grow long after your plants have died.
Green is also used to describe the unpleasant emotion, jealousy. The green-eyed monster is not a frightening creature from outer space. It is an expression used about 400 years ago by William Shakespeare in his play “Othello”.
| A．The plants produced much larger crops. |
| B．The expression comes from the early 1900s. |
| C．Sometimes, it describes something that is not yet ripe or finished. |
| D．Later, it meant a soldier who had not yet had any experience in battle. |
| E．It was used to describe a man who had just arrived from one of the big cities. |
| F．It was the result of hard work by agricultural scientists who had green thumbs. |
| G．It describes the unpleasant feeling a person has when someone has something he wants. |
【推荐1】Life today is much easier than it was hundreds of years ago, but has brought new peoplems. One of the biggest is pollution. Pollution come in many ways. We see it, smell it, drink it and even hear it.
Men have been polluting the earth. Many years ago, the pollution was not so serious because there were not so many people. When the land was used up or the river was dirty in one place, men moved to another place.
Air pollution is now the most serious. Air makes people sick. And lots of people now are trying to use something to clear the air. Water pollution kills our fish and pollutes our drinking water. Noise pollution makes us become angry more easily.
Many countries are making rules to fight air pollution. They stop people from burning coal in houses and factories in the city, and from putting dirty smoke into the air.
Pollution by SO2 is now the most dangerous kind of air pollution. It is caused by heavy traffic. It is true that if there are fewer people driving, there will be less air pollution.
Although most of the pollution is caused by us, we are the ones who can change the situation. The earth is our home. We must take care of it. And we must pay more attention to the information in pollution at the same time.
1. Why was the pollution in the past less serious?| A．Because life in the past was easier. | B．Because there were not so many people. |
| C．Because men stayed in one place. | D．Because people used less coal to make fire. |
| A．Air pollution. | B．Noise poliution. | C．Light pollution. | D．Water pollution. |
| A．Try to use something to clear the air | B．Ask people to use public transport more. |
| C．Stop putting dirty smoke into the air. | D．Encourage people to move to another place |
| A．Because there are so many factories. |
| B．Because the global warming is becoming worse and worse. |
| C．Because carbon dioxide emissions are increasing. |
| D．Because there is heavy traffic. |
| A．To prove life is much easier today. | B．To call on us to take care of our earth. |
| C．To show the danger of pollution. | D．To introduce how to fight air pollution. |
【推荐2】Want to help butterflies? A new study suggests turning off the lights.
Light pollution at night can disturb its abilities to recognize directions, researchers have found. Artificial light can disrupt their circadian (昼夜) rhythms and affect their sense of directions. That can make the butterflies disoriented when they try to fly the next day.
“Darkness is important to butterflies since the internal circadian clock of butterflies functions normally when they are exposed to natural day-night lighting cycles,” study author Patrick Guerra, an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, tells Treehugger.
Monarch butterflies migrate (迁徙) by the millions each year, making the trip from northern areas of the continent to California and Mexico and back. Because most butterflies only live for a few weeks to a few months, it takes several generations of butterflies to complete the migration. But too much light at the wrong time can urge the butterflies to take off when they should be resting instead for their voyage.
“As monarch butterflies are a threatened species with their population numbers in decline, we wanted to see what types of environmental stress might be linked to their decline,” Guerra says.
For their study, researchers conducted lab studies where they reproduced the effects of artificial light pollution with butterflies using a flight simulator (模拟器).
They first tested if monarchs treated a single, artificial light source as if it were the actual sun during the day. Once they established what they did, they then tested how the monarchs would behave when exposed to this same artificial light source during their night.
Butterflies stayed quiet and unmoving when they were first placed in the flight simulator in the dark. But as soon as scientists turned on the light, they started flying. The light made them believe that night was day and this can cause them to fly longer at night or start flying too early.
“These findings demonstrate how urbanization can negatively affect important biological phenomena, and therefore allow us to understand how human activity impacts the rest of nature,” Guerra says.
1. What does the underlined word “disoriented” in paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Slow down. | B．Die off. | C．Feel sleepy. | D．Get lost. |
| A．Why the monarch butterflies migrate. |
| B．What reduced the number of monarch butterflies. |
| C．Why darkness is important to monarch butterflies. |
| D．How monarch butterflies adapt to the environment. |
| A．A flashlight. | B．The sun. | C．The moon. | D．A clock. |
| A．Natural Light Is Important to Insects |
| B．Monarch Butterflies Are in Great Danger |
| C．Butterflies React Actively to Air Pollution |
| D．Light Pollution Can Affect Butterfly Migration |
【推荐3】The Arctic (北极) is heating up at a breakneck speed compared with the rest of Earth. And new analyses show that the region is warming even faster than scientists thought. Over the last four decades, the average Arctic temperature increased nearly four times as fast as the global average, researchers report in Communications Earth & Environment.
And that’s just on average. Some parts of the Arctic Ocean, such as the Barents Sea between Russia and Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago, are warming as much as seven times as fast, meteorologist Mika Rantanen of the Finnish Meteorological Institute in Helsinki and colleagues found. Previous studies have tended to say that the Arctic’s average temperature is. increasing two to three times as fast as elsewhere, as humans continue causing the climate to change.
To calculate the true pace of the accelerated warming, a phenomenon called Arctic amplification (放大), the researchers analyzed observational data from 1979 to 2021. Globally, the average temperature increasing over that time was about 0.2℃ per decade. But the Aretic was warming by about 0.75℃ per decade.
“Even the best climate models are not doing a great job of reproducing that warming,” Rantanen said. The inability of the models to realistically simulate past Arctic amplification calls into question how well the models can project future changes there.
It’s not clear where the problem lies. One issue may be that the models are struggling with correctly reproducing the sensitivity of Arctic temperatures to the loss of sea ice. Disappearing snow and ice, particularly sea ice, is one big reason why the Arctic is warming at this speed. The bright white snow and ice create a reflective barrier that bounces incoming radiation from the sun back into space. But open ocean waters or bare rocks absorb that heat, raising the temperature.
1. Which of the following can best describe the Arctic temperature?| A．It has come to its peak. | B．It has stopped increasing. |
| C．It is becoming as high as the global average. | D．It is increasing faster than other regions. |
| A．By referring to a theory. | B．By concluding different views. |
| C．By analyzing previous data. | D．By monitoring the temperature change. |
| A．The climate models are out of date. |
| B．Snow and ice absorb more heat than sea water. |
| C．It’s hard for the climate models to correctly predict the future Arctic temperature. |
| D．It’s clear how Arctic temperatures reacted to the loss of sea ice. |
| A．A research paper. | B．A travel brochure. |
| C．A geography textbook. | D．A computer magazine. |
