English was never my favourite subject until I joined Mr. Wu’s class. He gave me some great advice on     1     to improve my speaking so that I could speak more     2    (fluent). Gradually, I started to speak with more confidence. I really thanked Mr. Wu for what he    3    (do) for me.

4 . “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?” expects 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 ways of saying “Hello” and “Hi”.

People also don't say exactly what they are thinking when they finish conversations with other people. For example, many conversations over the phone end when one person says “I've got to go now”. Often, the person who wants to hang up gives an excuse: “Someone's at the door”; “I’ve got to put the groceries（杂物）away.” “Something is burning on the stove（炉子）.” The excuse 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 very polite to say that. The excuse is more polite, and it doesn't hurt the other person's feeling.

Whether they are greeting each other or ending a conversation, people often don't say exactly what they are thinking. It is an important way that people try to be nice to each other, and it's all part of the game of languages.

A video about a Chinese police officer’s broken English went viral on the Internet in China recently. In the video, a German student returned to Shanghai but got     1    (stop) by the security guards at the apartment gate. But the student doesn’t speak Chinese and the security doesn’t speak English. They couldn’t make     2     (they) understood. So the security ended up calling the police for help. Two police officers showed up on the spot, where they communicated with the student     3     very broken English and with body language.     4     settling the problem, the police officer told the student that she should learn some Chinese.

6 . “Funny”, a made-in-China emoji, seems to have recently moved beyond China. Now, it is more than an emoji, but a cultural expansion.

A series of “funny” emoji-based bolsters (抱枕) have attracted the attention of Japanese customers. Even if one bolster is more than three times as expensive as in China, it doesn’t kill their desires to buy it. One Japanese customer Miki said, “They are just so cute and I bought three bolsters at one time for my family. And every time I see them, my mood just brightens suddenly.”

A Japanese netizen Kiro Kara said, “I think the emoji implies very complicated meanings. My dad will send it when he doesn’t agree with someone but he has to say something and behave politely.”

Compared with Japanese impressions of the “funny” emoji, Chinese netizens prefer to use emoji to tease one another on social media.

One commonly seen online comment is, “We strongly suggest stopping the usage of the emoji. Because every time other people send me the emoji, I feel very uncomfortable and consider myself as a fool.”

Regarded as the most popular emoji, the “funny” emoji has received much attention since its release in 2013. In fact, the “funny” emoji is the updated version of its original one; “funny” has a smiley mouth, two eyebrows and a naughty look. All these characteristics present users a sense of satire (讽刺).

It's not the first time the Chinese emoji takes the world stage. Earlier this year, one emoji from the Chinese basketball celebrity Yao Ming has been spread through the Middle East region. In a city in southern Egypt, Yao’s smiling emoji has appeared frequently in local traffic signs to remind people the road ahead is one-way. Many locals do not know Yao Ming but are familiar with his emoji and nickname “Chinese Funny Face”.

As a new online language, emojis have become a necessary part of people’s daily life, helping people express their views in a more vivid and precise way. Also, it can help foreigners learn about Chinese culture. But how to properly use “the fifth innovation in China” without hurting others and turn them into commercial advantages still need answers.

A．	B．
C．	D．

Why do you feel encouraged when your teacher gives you a smile? How do you know your mother is angry when she frowns(皱眉)? In both cases, the person is telling us something not with words, but with facial expressions.

Facial expressions are one or more movements on a person’s face, such as frowning, raising one’s eyebrows(眉毛)，and nose and lip(嘴唇) movements. They express people’s feelings.

Scientists at Oxford University have shown that humans have 80 muscles(肌肉) on their faces. These muscles can create more than 7, 000 facial expressions. However , there are six main kinds of facial expressions that are common in all cultures: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger and disgust(厌恶).

Facial expressions are very important to communication. One study at UCLA, in the US, showed that in most conversations, over 93 percent of the communicating is done without speaking.

If people can read facial expressions, they may be better at knowing what other people are feeling, so they can understand them better. Someone who does not enjoy a certain type of food usually will make a face when he/she sees or tastes it. A frown means worry or anger. Raised eyebrows and open eyes show surprise.

However, there are some taboos(禁忌) for reading people’s facial expressions. For example, it is not a good idea to stare at someone for a long time while reading his or her facial expressions. They may think you are rude.

8 . Over the past half-century, scientists have settled on two reasonable theories related to baby talk. One states that a young child’s brain needs time to master language. The second theory states that a child’s vocabulary level is the key factor. According to this theory, some key steps have to occur in a logical sequence before sentence formation occurs.

In 2007, researchers at Harvard University, who were studying the two theories, found a clever way to test them. More than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter the U.S. each year. Many of them no longer hear their birth language after they arrive, and they must learn English more or less the same way infants(婴儿) do. International adoptees don’t take classes or use a dictionary when they are learning their new tongue. All of these factors make them an ideal population in which researchers could test these competing theories about how language is learned.

Neuroscientists Jesse Snedeker, Joy Geren and Carissa Shafto studied the language development of 27 children adopted from India between the ages of two and five years. These children began learning English at an older age than US natives and had more mature brains. Even so, just as American-born infants, their first English sentences consisted of single words. The adoptees then went through the same stages as typical American-born children, though at a faster clip. The adoptees and native children started combining words in sentences when their vocabulary reached the same sizes, further suggesting that what matters is not how old you are or how mature your brain is, but the number of words you know.

This finding—that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the baby talk stage—suggests that babies speak in baby talk not because they have baby brains, but because they have only just started learning and need time to gain enough vocabulary. Before long, the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on. Learning how to chat like an adult is a gradual process.

But this finding also raises an even older and more difficult question. Adult immigrants who learn a second language rarely achieve the same proficiency in a foreign language as the average child raised as a native speaker. Researchers have long suspected there is a “critical period” for language development, after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency. Yet we still do not understand this critical period or know why it ends.

Keeping a diary in English is an effective way to improve our English writing ability. It can help us to develop the habit of thinking in English. If we persist in this practice, we’ll learn how to express     1     (we) in English. Of course, we may come across some problems. For example,     2     often happens is that we have trouble    3     (find) proper words to get our meaning across.

In short, I believe that it is of great use     4     (keep) a diary in English.

10 . In this semester, Professor Van Rijnsoever of Utrecht University of the Netherlands is to teach “Dutch Culture in the World”, in English.

The language is the university’s choice. Actually sixty percent of masters’ programs at Utrecht University are in English. At higher degrees' level, no courses are taught in Dutch at all.

Utrecht is not alone.

The University of Eindhoven has even completely kicked the Dutch language out of its campus. Even the sandwiches in the stores there are sold as cheese rather than with the Dutch word “kaas”.

As a result, the Netherlands has one of the world’s highest levels of English proficiency （流利）among non-native speaking countries, second only to Sweden.

But not everyone is happy with that .

“I don't mind. Most of the literature is in English,” says Professor Van Rijnsoever. “As a teacher it’s not that much of a problem because we also do research in English. For the students, you see they are struggling to express themselves properly.”

He added “We aren’t as good at English as they think we are. We shouldn’t use a weaker language in education. If we use just English in higher education, Dutch will get worse. We add a bit of English and we lose a bit of Dutch. We cannot master Dutch and English at the same time.”

Actually, English is so widely used in Dutch universities that a group of lecturers are worried about a possible “linguicide” and demanded that the universities stop creating more courses in English until an official research has been carried out.

“Dutch is our mother tongue. Our culture is based on Dutch,” says Annette de Groot, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. “What would happen to our identity（身份）if our mother tongue is no longer the main language of higher education?”

“It is high time for an honest debate.” said a teacher from the University of Erasmus.