Americans use many expressions with the word “dog”. People in the United States love their dogs and treat them well.
Some people say we live in a dog-eat-dog world.
Dog expressions are also used to describe the weather. The dog days of summer are the hottest days of the year. A rainstorm may cool the weather. But we do not want it to rain too hard.
| A．Some people are compared to dogs in bad ways. |
| B．Dogs are people’s loyal friends all the time. |
| C．Still, people say every dog has its day. |
| D．They take their dogs for walks, let them play outside and give them nice meals. |
| E．That means many people are competing for the same things, like good jobs. |
| F．Sometimes, morning rain can light up the day. |
| G．We do not want it to rain cats and dogs. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】What country does English belong to? The answer seems obvious: Britain. But there are about 18 million or 40% of people in the European Union speaking English— much more than the combine population of those core English-speaking countries, such as Britain, Canada and Australia.
To make things more complex, the number of English-speakers born outside the tradition English-speaking countries grows every day and it is becoming not just a useful second language, but native one there. Already it is easy to find children in northern Europe who speak as though they come from America because they have been watching Hollywood films and TV programs, along with music gaming and social media.
Today, many learners still aim for an American or British standard. Textbooks instruct India English-speakers to avoid Indianisms such as “What is your good name?” for “What is your first name?”, or “I am working here for years.” instead of “I have been working here for years.” A guide to avoiding Europeanisms has long existed in European Union institutions to keep German-speakers from using “actual” to mean “current”, as it does in their language.
Given enough time, new generations of foreign language speakers contribute not just words but their own grammar to the language they learn. “I am working here for years.” is a mistake today, but it is not hard to imagine it becoming standard in the future in India. If this disturbs you, remember that this text is written in a language that was a mixture of French, Latin and others until it became an unrecognizably different tongue.
No language has ever reached more speakers than English. It is hard to predict how they will change it, but it is easy to rule out the possibility that they will not change it at all. But you can take comfort in the fact that such changes usually happen too slowly to affect comprehension in a single lifetime.
1. What phenomenon is described in the first two paragraphs?| A．The influence of the English-speaking countries. |
| B．The widespread use of English outside Britain. |
| C．The popularity of Hollywood films and TV programs. |
| D．The increasing importance of the European Union. |
| A．They will be officially replaced by standard English. |
| B．They will be accepted as standards by other countries. |
| C．They will be considered grammatically correct in India. |
| D．They will become a different language in the near future. |
| A．It is unavoidable for English to change over time. |
| B．English has been influenced by different languages. |
| C．English might be unrecognizable in one generation. |
| D．It is important to keep English from foreign influences. |
| A．To argue against the necessity of standard English. |
| B．To show his opinion on the changes of English. |
| C．To explain the causes behind language changes. |
| D．To call for more strict standards for English teaching. |
【推荐2】When sociolinguist Calvin Gidney say The Lion King in theaters two decades ago, he was struck by the differences between Mufasa and Scar. The characters don't have much in common. Mufasa is heroic and faithful, while Scar is cynical (嘲讽的) and power-hungry.
Gidney, an associate professor at Tufts University, saw Scar’s accent as part of a disturbing pattern in the film -foreign accents and non-standard dialects were being used to voice all of the "bad” characters. Gidney also noticed that Scar’s minions (部下) , the hyenas (鬣狗),spoke in ether African American English or English with a Spanish accent.
Gidney found this trend concerning. "I thought it was really disturbing and it was necessary to ‘take back the jungle' from the British- sounding evil lion, plus the African American-sounding and Latino-sounding hyenas," he said.
Gidney was inspired to conduct a study of language patterns in animated kids' entertainment. He teamed up with Julie Dobrow, a senior lecturer at Tufts who specializes in issues of children and media, to study how these trends play out on kids' television shows. They’ve since analyzed about 30 shows and 1,500 characters, and they’re still at work on the project.
For their initial study in 1998, Gidney and Dobrow had a team of coders analyze 323 animated TV characters.
In many of the cases studied, villains (恶棍) were given foreign accents.
The most wicked（邪恶的）foreign accent of all was British English, according to the study.
Since television is an important source of cultural messaging for children, this correlation of foreign accents with "bad "characters could have concerning influence on the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States.
| A．A modern-day example is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the bad guy in Phineas and Ferb who speaks in a German(ish)accent. |
| B．But what Gidney noticed most was how they each spoke. |
| C．From Scar to Aladdin's Jafar, the study found that British is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. |
| D．They have continued to find these same accent trends through the past few decades. |
| E．The study's findings are noteworthy in part because television's entertainment value makes it a powerful mode of messaging. |
| F．Their findings suggested that lots of kids' shows use language to mark certain traits in a given character. |
A bank statement –– these are those letters from the bank telling you how much you’ve spent or saved. They come in those envelopes that are so depressing to see when you’re in the red. | Coins –– they are the pieces of metal money in your pocket; and they seem to mysteriously disappear every time you desperately need to make a call from a public phone box. |
A cashier –– in Britain these bank workers who serve you are ever so friendly and helpful…until they know you’ve got money problems. | A bank letter –– this is the angry letter from the bank telling you to pay up or suffer the additional expense of a court case. |
A cash machine –– these holes in the wall that throw out money (ATMs in the US) are so useful. But be careful to check who’s standing behind you! | Cash –– if you carry lots of this paper money with you, the probability of you getting robbed or losing your wallet increases by 100% － it’s a rule of nature. |
A credit card –– so easy to use, so easy to abuse! They’re also known as your “flexible friend”, although “flexible enemy” would be more appropriate. | A loan –– this is the money that banks give you to start up your business or buy a bigger car. It’s all very exciting at first…until interest rates shoot up. |
An overdraft (透支) –– this is permission from the bank to take out more money than you have. It’s great in theory, but disastrous in practice. | A mortgage (按揭) –– this is the money you borrow to buy a house, usually with you for at least twenty years…a long time to be paying for something. |
| A．A bank statement is equal to a bank letter. |
| B．Cashiers in Britain serve clients with good manners. |
| C．You should be on alert when you draw cash from ATMs. |
| D．You can use a credit card as easily and freely as you can. |
| A．cash | B．loan | C．mortgage | D．credit card |
| A．Financial advice. | B．Job advertisement. |
| C．Economic knowledge. | D．English vocabulary. |
