2015年5月9日雅思阅读Passage 3真题回忆

Passage 3

题材：文化类

新旧情况：新题

题目：The Future of Language

题型：summary4+判断+填空

文章标题关于小语种保护

雅思考试成绩难提高？来新通，五星金牌名师课免费听！         马上预约！

参考答案

填空：minority，significance，difference，extinction 还有一个忘了

选择题：选过一个答案是说has both advantage and disadvantage；还选了一个是意思小语种那些人可以不用放弃他们的语言也能与时具进？还有个选了这个research还是project会有success

文章大意：

类似旧题，仅供练习

SaveEndangered Language

“Obviouslywe must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go downin history as the only science that presided obviously over the disappearanceof 90percent of the very field to which it is dedicated. “-Michael Krauss, “TheWorld’s Languages in Crisis ”.

A

Tenyears ago Michael Krauss sent a shudder through the discipline of linguisticswith his prediction that half the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the worldwould cease to be uttered within a century. Unless scientists and communityleaders directed a worldwide effort to stabilize the decline of local languages,he warned, nine tenths of the linguistic diversity of humankind would probablybe doomed to extinction. Krauss’s prediction was little more than an educatedguess, but other respected linguists had been clanging out similar alarms.Keneth L. Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology noted in the samejournal issue that eight languages on which he had done fieldwork had sincepassed into extinction. A 1990 survey in Australia found that 70 of the 90surviving Aboriginal languages were no longer used regularly by all age groups.The same was true for all but 20 of the 175 Native American languages spoken orremembered in the US., Krauss told a congressional panel in 1992.

B

Manyexperts in the field mourn the loss of rare languages, for several reasons. Tostart, there is scientific self-interest: some of the most basic questions in linguisticshave to do with the limits of human speech, which are far from fully explored.Many researchers would like to know which structural elements of grammar andvocabulary—if any— are truly universal and probably therefore hardwired intothe human brain. Other scientists try to reconstruct ancient migration patternsby comparing borrowed words that appear in otherwise unrelated languages. Ineach of these cases, the wider the portfolio of languages you study, the morelikely you are to get the right answers.

雅思考试成绩难提高？来新通，五星金牌名师课免费听！         马上预约！

C

Despitethe near constant buzz in linguistics about endangered languages over the past10 years, the field has accomplished depressingly little. “You would think thatthere would be some organized response to this dire situation,” some attempt todetermine which language can be saved and which should be documented beforethey disappear, says Sarah G. Thomason, a linguist at the University ofMichigan at Ann Arbor. “But there isn’t any such effort organized in the profession.It is only recently that it has become fashionable enough to work on endangeredlanguages.” Six years ago, recalls Douglas H. Whalen of Yale University, “whenI asked linguists who was raising money to deal with these problems, I mostlygot blank stares.” So Whalen and a few other linguists founded the EndangeredLanguages Fund. In the five years to 2001 they were able to collect only$80,000 for research grants. A similar foundation in England, directed byNicholas Ostler, has raised just $8,000 since 1995.

D

Butthere are encouraging signs that the field has turned a corner. The VolkswagenFoundation, a German charity, just issued its second round of grants totalingmore than $2 million. It has created a multimedia archive at the Max PlanckInstitute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands that can house recordings,grammars, dictionaries and other data on endangered languages. To fill thearchive, the foundation has dispatched field linguists to document Aweti (100or so speakers in Brazil), Ega (about 300 speakers in Ivory Coast), Waima’a (afew hundred speakers in East Timor), and a dozen or so other languages unlikelyto survive the century. The Ford Foundation has also edged into the arena. Itscontributions helped to reinvigorate a master-apprentice program created in1992 by Leanne Hinton of Berkeley and Native Americans worried about theimminent demise of about 50 indigenous languages in California. Fluent speakersreceive $3,000 to teach a younger relative (who is also paid) their nativetongue through 360 hours of shared activities, spread over six months. So farabout 5 teams have completed the program, Hinton says, transmitting at leastsome knowledge of 25 languages. “It’s too early to call this languagerevitalization,” Hinton admits. “In California the death rate of elderlyspeakers will always be greater than the recruitment rate of young speakers.But at least we prolong the survival of the language.” That will give linguistsmore time to record these tongues before they vanish.

雅思考试成绩难提高？来新通，五星金牌名师课免费听！         马上预约！

E

Butthe master-apprentice approach hasn’t caught on outside the U.S., and Hinton’seffort is a drop in the sea. At least 440 languages have been reduced to a merehandful of elders, according to the Ethnologue, a catalogue of languagesproduced by the Dallas-based group SIL International that comes closest toglobal coverage. For the vast majority of these languages, there is little orno record of their grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation or use in daily life.Even if a language has been fully documented, all that remains once it vanishesfrom active use is a fossil skeleton, a scattering of features that the scientistwas lucky and astute enough to capture. Linguists may be able to sketch anoutline of the forgotten language and fix its place on the evolutionary tree,but little more. “How did people start conversations and talk to babies? Howdid husbands and wives converse?” Hinton asks. “Those are the first things youwant to learn when you want to revitalize the language.”

F

Butthere is as yet no discipline of “conservation linguistics,” as there is for biology.Almost every strategy tried so far has succeeded in some places but failed inothers, and there seems to be no way to predict with certainty what will workwhere. Twenty years ago in New Zealand, Maori speakers set up “language nests,”in which preschoolers were immersed in the native language. AdditionalMaori-only classes were added as the children progressed through elementary andsecondary school. A similar approach was tried in Hawaii, with some success—the number of native speakers has stabilized at 1,000 or so, reports Joseph E.Grimes of SIL International, who is working on Oahu. Students can now getinstruction in Hawaiian all the way through university.

雅思考试成绩难提高？来新通，五星金牌名师课免费听！         马上预约！

G

Onefactor that always seems to occur in the demise of a language is that the speakersbegin to have collective doubts about the usefulness of language loyalty. Oncethey start regarding their own language as inferior to the majority language,people stop using it for all situations. Kids pick up on the attitude andprefer the dominant language. In many cases, people don’t notice until theysuddenly realize that their kids never speak the language, even at home. Thisis how Cornish and some dialects of Scottish Gaelic is still only rarely usedfor daily home life in Ireland, 80 years after the republic was founded withIrish as its first official language.

H

Linguistsagree that ultimately, the answer to the problem of language extinction ismultilingualism. Even uneducated people can learn several languages, as long asthey start as children. Indeed, most people in the world speak more than onetongue, and in places such as Cameroon (279 languages), Papua New Guinea (823)and India (387) it is common to speak three or four distinct languages and adialect or two as well. Most Americans and Canadians, to the west of Quebec,have a gut reaction that anyone speaking another language in front of them iscommitting an immoral act. You get the same reaction in Australia and Russia.It is no coincidence that these are the areas where languages are disappearingthe fastest. The first step in saving dying languages is to persuade theworld’s majorities to allow the minorities among them to speak with their ownvoices.

推荐专家
	姓名：刘扬   电话：0431-88596226 电子邮箱：sallyliuyang@shinyway 所在地点：长春市西安大路727号 中银大厦A座509室 咨询国家/地区：null