A book that is conveniently handled, especially handbook is called _____.

Man is called in Creek the zoon phonanta or talking animal. What makes humanity different from the rest of the animal world is its capacity for constructing a system of sound signals which stand not only for its thoughts and feelings about the outside world but for the outside world itself. You will say at once that certain birds talk and some of them talk very well. Chimpanzees can be taught a number of words and a few simple grammatical structures. But only human beings are able to invent whole languages, not merely mimic parts of them or handle a few nouns and verbs. When an animal began to talk, that animal called itself man.

Speech certainly came before the discovery of fire. We still tend to use speech not for conveying messages or expressing feelings but merely for establishing and sustaining human contact.

The act of speaking serves primarily the end of sociability. It does not have to mean anything, but it has to be continuous. At dinner parties a prolonged silence is the most embarrassing thing in the world: it seems to indicate that sociability has failed. It is often broken by more than one person’s speaking at the same time -- excuse me -- sorry -- after you -- no, after you -- and what is said is far less important than the fact of somebody having said something, anything. Every body breathes a sigh of relief, especially the hostess.

We have no means of knowing what the language of, say Stone Age man, was like, but we know something of that ancient language known as Indo-European because its structure and some of its vocabulary, much changed, survive in the daughter languages, which means most of the languages of Europe. It seems to have been a complex language, with a rich grammar, not at all like Malay or Chinese, and it is fairly certain that the further back we go in our study of language the greater complexities we find.

The simplification of language is essentially a part of the modernization of language: modern English is grammatically much simpler than its ancestor Anglo-Saxon, and Italian and Spanish are much simpler than their mother Latin. It is wrong to think of the first talkers taking a few linguistic bricks, joining them together, then baking more bricks and adding them to make a more and more imposing structure. An original babble was associated with a particular feeling or thought, but it was only in the period after, say, the break-up of the Roman Empire that grammarians began to analyze the parts of this babble and come up with terms like noun, verb, adjective, and adverb.

All of us say things we never said before, and without much conscious effort; we' re always inventing new things to say. That is the great human talent. This talent is based, however, on a very simple peculiarity of the human brain -- its capacity to think in opposed structures.

Look at it this way: the spectrum has many colors in it, and man learned to pick out colors as separable items. He did more; he learned how to make them into signs of opposed meaning. You have only to think of a traffic signal to see that this is so. Now out of the babble of noise which the human vocal system is capable of producing it is possible to separate specific sounds and oppose one to the other. Pick does not mean the same as pig, because/k/is opposed to/ g/, though those two sounds only differ (in English, anyway) in that one is breathed and the other sung. This structuralist gift of the human brain enables us to talk of tiny structures that oppose each other in doing separate jobs and, taken together, add up to a language.

What makes human beings different from the rest of the animal world is their ability to ______.

A．learn a number of words

B．be taught a few grammatical structures

C．invent whole languages

D．to express their thoughts and feelings

What should you do to make sure your invoice is properly handled?

We should send ______ to confirm it.

______ me most was that the young boy who had lost both arms in an accident could handle a pen with his feet.

A．That amazed

B．It amazed

C．Which amazed

D．What amazed

______ me most was that the young boy who had lost both arms in an accident could handle a pen with his feet.

A．That amazed

B．It amazed

C．Which amazed

D．What amazed

______ me most was that the young boy who had lost both arms in an accident could handle a pen with his feet.

A．That: amazed

B．It amazed

C．Which amazed

D．What amazed

【30】

A．put

B．get

C．handle

D．give

A history of long effortless success can be a dreadful handicap, but, if properly handled, it may become a driving force. When the Untied States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industrial unparalleled economies of scale. Its scientists were the world's best, its workers the most skilled. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.

It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer. Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980% Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. (Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea's LG electronics in July.) Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America's machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.

All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. Tile mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the cause of America's industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.

How things have changed! In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling. Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt has yield to blind pride. "American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learned to be more quick-witted". According to Richard Cavanaugh, executive dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our business are improving their productivity". Says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look hack on this period as "a golden age of business management in the United States".

The U.S. achieved its predominance after World War Ⅱ because ______.

A．it had made painstaking effort towards this goal

B．its domestic market was eight times larger than before

C．the war had destroyed the economies of most potential competitors

D．the unparalleled size of its workforce had given an impetus to its economy

听力原文：W: Yes, sir. Can I help you?

M: Um yes. I bought this radio-cassette player here a couple of weeks ago. Here's the receipt.

W: Ahha. That's fine. What seems to be the problem?

M: Well, it's been nothing but trouble since I bought it.

W: OK. Just let me take a note of this. Err, radio-cassette player.

M: The first thing is one of the speakers doesn't work properly. The sound is completely distorted with the radio or a tape.

W: Which one is it?

M: The right-hand one. Another problem is the left cassette player. It chews up tapes. It's completely mined two of my favorite cassettes.

W: Oh dear. The speaker and the cassette player.

M: One of the cassettes was brand new, oh, and the rewind switch doesn't work. Actually it never did.

W: OK. So there's the fight-hand speaker...the cassette player and...urn, the rewind switch. Is that it?

M: No, I'm afraid not. The aerial doesn't work properly. It's stuck.

W: Hmm, I see what you mean. The handle is broken too.

M: Yes, I'd forgotten about that. It's not very good, is it?

W: Err, no. But it's under guarantee and we can repair it. Just give me your name.

M: Jonathan Hall.

W: And phone number.

M: My home number is 67532, work is 78549.

W: 78549. And it is the, urn, 11th of February.

M: Yes. That's right.

W: OK. Mr. Hall. Here is your copy. We'll give you a ring when it's ready.

(23)

A．It has too much interference.

B．It produces no sound whatsoever.

C．The sound is too low.

D．The sound is completely distorted.