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  3. Think of the loneliness felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last pers

Think of the loneliness felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last pers

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问题     Think of the loneliness felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974—he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed.
    Does it matter? Plenty of languages—among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chib-cha—have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to posterity. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues—from Manchu(spoken in China)to Hua(Botswana)and Gwich’in(Alaska)—are in danger of suffering a similar fate?
    Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicise an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6,900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and South-East Asia.
    Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realised that whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian was the key to success; citizens of China face similar pressure to focus on Mandarin, the main Chinese dialect.
    Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language.
    But in an age of mass communications, the threats to linguistic diversity are less crucial and more spontaneous. Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language(such as Swahili in East Africa)or a global one(such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by films and computer games.
According to Paragraph 1, Marie Smith’s solitude results from the fact that
选项 A、she lives alone and no one accompanies her.
B、people around her could not understand her language.
C、she is the last person having Eyak as mother-tongue.
D、as a native Alaska, she lives far away from that place.
答案C
解析 事实细节题。根据题干关键词Marie Smith’s提示定位至第一段。解答本题的关键是对第一段前两句话的理解：第一句提示读者设想玛丽·史密斯的孤独感；第二句解释了造成孤独感的原因，即她是世界上最后一位掌握埃亚克人母语的人。所以正确答案是[C]。[A]“没人陪伴”未在文中出现；[B]有一定的干扰性：文中只提到玛丽是世界上最后一位掌握埃亚克人母语的人，这并不意味着她不能和周围的人交流，而且她是土生土长的阿拉斯加州人，不可能不被她周围的人理解；[D]中she lives far away from that place并未在文中提及，故排除。
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