Though an increasing number of international students are learning Chinese, it may be
My love for Chinese can date back to my childhood.
In my view, though one may have trouble learning a foreign language, one needs to think positively. Additionally, the harder one works, the
3 . No matter how friendly your tone is or how honey-sweet you are in a conversation, when you start your sentences with one of these words (or both), the message to your recipient is “You are wrong.”
These words don’t say, “Let’s discuss this” or “I’d love to hear what you think about this” to people. They say. “You are wrong and I am right.” If your conversation companion is also eager to win at any cost, you will have a potential battle on your hands. The result?
Are you interested in a little test to see how competitive your co-workers are? Try this. For one week, keep a scorecard of how many times each person uses “No” or “But” to start a sentence.
Stop trying to defend your position and start monitoring how many times you begin remarks with “No” or “But”.
| A．Why do people like saying this? |
| B．I use this technique with my clients. |
| C．What are these conversation stopping words? |
| D．Nothing more can happen that will be productive. |
| E．It’s human nature to like being accepted and recognized. |
| F．You will be shocked at how frequently these words are used. |
| G．Pay close attention to when you use these words in sentences. |
4 . About 7,000 languages in use today speak to the fact that our species is born to communicate. But while we tend to view language as merely a consequence of our extraordinary cognitive (认知的) powers, Caleb Everett thinks there may be more going on. Everett argues in his book “A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think” that language itself may influence our understanding of the world and our experience of time and space.
Such a challenging idea might have caused arguments a few decades ago, says Everett, because linguists (语言学家) restricted themselves to analyzing languages of industrialized, higher-income countries. These are relatively similar, so they encourage speakers to think along broadly similar lines, he says. But we now know they fall short of representing the variety of languages spoken today — and the more we learn about understudied languages, the more evidence we find for the complicated interaction between language and thinking.
Consider Berinmo, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea. Unlike English speakers, explains Everett, Berinmo speakers struggle to remember whether an object they were shown earlier was blue or green — perhaps because that language doesn’t distinguish between these colors. But it does make a formal distinction between yellowish-greens and other greens, and Berinmo speakers typically find it easy to remember which of these colors an object they saw earlier was, while English speakers struggle to do this.
Everett’s book celebrates two main subjects: understudied languages, with the interesting insights they offer, and the careful work of linguists, cognitive scientists, and other experts to explore the way language influences our thinking.
As Everett stresses, this work is vital as we live through a language extinction event predicted to see the loss of about 30 percent of today’s languages by 2100. His book makes it clear that this is more than just a tragedy for local communities. Given the insights that languages offer into the human mind, their disappearance is detrimental to us all.
1. What does Everett’s book discuss?| A．How many languages are still in use. |
| B．How language may impact our world view. |
| C．How humans gain languages since birth. |
| D．How language promotes mental development. |
| A．By following advice from language experts. |
| B．By interviewing different cognitive scientists. |
| C．By gaining insights from minority languages. |
| D．By contrasting the world’s dominant languages. |
| A．It is accurate in describing objects. | B．It is greatly influenced by English. |
| C．It has a decreasing number of users. | D．It has a unique way of telling colors apart. |
| A．Harmful. | B．Familiar. | C．Essential. | D．Strange. |
5 . Phonetic (语音) information—the smallest sound elements of speech - is considered by researchers to be the basis of language. Babies are thought to learn these small sound elements and add them together to make words. But a new study suggests that phonetic information is learnt too late and slowly for this to be the case. Instead, rhythmic (有韵律的) speech helps babies learn language and is effective even in the first few months of life.
Researchers from the Trinity College Dublin investigated babies’ ability to process phonetic information during their first year. Their study, published in the journal Nature Communications. found that phonetic information wasn’t successfully encoded (编码) until seven months old, and did not occur very often at 11 months old when babies began to say their first words. From then individual speech sounds are still added in very slowly—too slowly to form the basis of language.
The researchers recorded patterns of brain activity in 50 babies at four, seven, and eleven months old as they watched a video of a primary school teacher singing 18 nursery rhymes (童谣) to a baby. They found that phonetic encoding in babies appeared inchmeal over the first year of life, beginning with labial sounds (e.g. “d” for “daddy”) and nasal sounds (e.g. “m” for “mummy”), with the “read out” progressively looking more like that of adults.
“The reason why we use nursery rhymes is because that is the best way for babies to discover and connect sounds with language, so we are teaching them how to speak,” said Giovanni Di Liberto, lead author of the study at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. “Parents should talk and sing to their babies as much as possible or use baby-directed speech because it will make a difference to language outcome,” she added.
1. What should babies learn in the first few months of life according to the new study?| A．Small sound elements | B．Rhythmic information. |
| C．Phonetic information. | D．Individual words. |
| A．The poor phonetic encoding in babies. | B．The advantages of phonetic information. |
| C．The babies’ great ability to learn language. | D．The babies’ growing process in the first year. |
| A．Gradually. | B．Suddenly. | C．Successfully. | D．Occasionally. |
| A．When Babies Are Able to Say Their First Words |
| B．How Phonetic Information Changes Over Time |
| C．Why Phonetic Is Better Than Rhythmic for Babies |
| D．Why Babies Need Nursery Rhymes for Language Mastery |
To tell you the truth, the motive for me to learn English well is
7 . Two languages worldwide are lost every week. Cherokee is a highly endangered Native American language. Currently, there are fewer than 2,000 speakers of the language remaining in the world, and the number is declining every year. Keeping a language alive can strengthen people’s sense of identity and most importantly, lead to the preservation of a whole culture. The creation of an album of original songs performed in the Cherokee language is one of the most original methods.
Cherokee and non-Cherokee music artists decided to create a music album in the Cherokee language. This is part of a project to preserve this ancient, fading language. The album features a dozen Cherokee artists and includes a real variety of genres (类型) ranging from folk, country, and heavy metal to hip hop.
There are different ways to keep a language alive, and the album intends to bring a modern approach to the revitalization (复兴) of the Cherokee language. One promising strategy is to introduce it to young people, and what better route than to use the language of contemporary music to achieve such a meaningful goal.
“Wherever our kids are, our language needs to be there, too,” the executive director of the Cherokee Nation Language Department, Howard Paden, explained. “Our belief is very simple. The Cherokee language is so powerful that people can enjoy using it very easily and are unable to stop using it. If we can get the language around to people and make the language enter their hearts at a very young age, then they will always be connected with who we are as a people.”
Multilingualism (多语种主义) is very powerful since it provides a different way of understanding and perceiving the world. This can result in technological and scientific advancement for humankind. So preserving endangered languages like Cherokee is not only about helping specific communities affected but also about recognizing and celebrating diversity as one of humankind’s greatest strengths.
1. What’s the purpose of the first paragraph?| A．To describe the features of the Cherokee language. |
| B．To stress the importance of learning different languages. |
| C．To explain why artists make the Cherokee music album. |
| D．To introduce the development of the Cherokee language. |
| A．Diverse. | B．Beautiful. | C．Mysterious. | D．Popular. |
| A．The Cherokee language is very addictive. |
| B．Young people should love music in their hearts. |
| C．The Cherokee language is difficult for people to learn. |
| D．Young people should learn how to connect with others. |
| A．Multilingualism is powerful for humankind |
| B．The Native American language faces a great crisis |
| C．Preserving endangered languages needs great efforts |
| D．An artistic approach to preserving a language is on track |
| A．How to understand expressions. |
| B．How to make desserts. |
| C．How to solve problems. |
| A．The meaning of some expressions. |
| B．The recipe for some desserts. |
| C．The solutions to some problems. |
My love for Chinese can date back to my childhood. Though there are various Chinese characters, I intend
In my view, when having trouble
