3 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the following passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
The death of languages is not a new phenomenon. Languages usually have a short life span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, have lasted more than 2,000 years.
What is new, however, is the speed at which they are dying out. Europe’s colonial ruling caused a sharp decrease in language kinds, reducing at least 15 percent of all languages spoken at the time. Over the last 300 years, Europe has lost a dozen, and Australia has only 20 left of the 250 spoken at the end of the 18th century.
The rise of nation-states has also been decisive in selecting national languages. By making great efforts to establish an official language in education, the media, national governments have tried to reduce minority languages.
This process of language standardization has been improved by industrialization and scientific progress, which have created new methods of communication that are fast, straightforward and practical. Language kinds came to be seen as a difficulty to trade and the spread of knowledge. Monolingualism (单种语言) became an perfect choice.
More recently, the internationalization of financial markets, the spread of information by electronic media and other aspects of globalization have led to the danger to “small” languages. A language not on the Internet is a language that “no longer exists” in the modern world. It is out of the game.
The serious effects of the death of languages are clear. First of all, it is possible that if we all ended up speaking the same language, our brains would lose some of their natural functions for language inventiveness. We would never be able to figure out the origins of human language or resolve the mystery of “the first language”. As each language dies, a chapter of human history closes.
Multilingualism (多语种) is the most right solution. The destruction of the first will lead to the loss of the second. Creating a language without any links to a people’s culture and way of life stifles the expression of their language gift. A language is not only used as the main instrument of human communication, it also expresses the world vision of those who speak it, their ways of using knowledge. To safeguard languages is an urgent matter.
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