Learning a language only means knowing its structural rules and vocabulary according to the functional view.

The sounds we call words can be called a language only if ______.

A．each sound has a different meaning

B．each sound is different from the other

C．there is a system of writing

D．they have a structure or grammar

The sounds we call words can be called a language only if ______.

A．each sound has a different meaning

B．each sound is different from the other

C．there is a system of writing

D．they have a structure or grammar

Sounds can be called a language only when they have a structure and a grammar.

Sounds can be called a language only when they have a structure and a grammar.

A．Right

B．Wrong

C．Not mentioned

Languages will continue to diverge. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different forms. Indeed the same could happen to English as has happened to Chinese: a language of intellectuals which doesn't vary hugely alongside a large number of variants used by local peoples.

We will continue to teach other languages in some form, and not just for reasons of practicality, Learning a language is good for your mental health; it forces you to understand another cultural and intellectual system. So I hope British education will develop a more rational approach to the foreign languages available to students in line with their political importance. Because so many people believe it's no longer important to know another language, I fear that time devoted to language teaching in schools may well continue to decline. But you can argue that learning another language well is more taxing than, say, learning to play chess well-- it involves sensitivity to a set of complicated rules, and also to context.

Technology will certainly make a difference to the use of foreign languages. Computers may, for instance, alleviate the drudgery that a vast translation represents. But no one who has seen a computer translation will think it can substitute for knowledge of the different languages. A machine will always be behind the times. Still more important is the fact that no computer will ever get at the associations beyond the words associations that may not be expressed but which carry much of the meaning. In languages like Arabic that context is very important. Languages come with heavy cultural baggage too-- in French or German if you missed the cultural references behind a word you're very likely to be missing the meaning. It will be very hard to teach all that to a computer.

All the predictions are that English will be spoken by a declining proportion of the world's population in the 21st century. I don't think foreign languages will really become less important, but they might be perceived to be-- and that would in the end be a very bad thing.

From the first paragraph we can infer that ______.

A．English is the universal language

B．Chinese would become the universal language

C．languages always take kinds of forms

D．English has no variants, but Chinese does

Sounds can be called a language only when they have a structure and a grammar.

A．Right

B．Wrong

C．Not mentioned

Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-olds there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy means almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone.

There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today—everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring—means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle class India compared to the tribes.

For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years—even the past 100 years—our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they "look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension". No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

What used to be the danger in being a man according to the first paragraph?

A．A lack of mates.

B．A fierce competition.

C．A lower survival rate.

D．A defective gene.

According to the passage, the critical period for learning a language is ______.

A．at the age of ten months

B．between the ages of about ten months and ten years

C．at the age of ten years

D．from some time after birth to six or seven years