2. 外语
  3. At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing th

At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing th

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问题     At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing that separates humans from the animals is..." You may have even heard such a sentiment completed in more than one way—some say it is our large brains, others our opposable thumbs, and still others claim it is our ability to use tools. While all of these attributes sound reasonable enough, none of them is truly unique to the human species. There are plenty of large mammals that have bigger brains than human beings, and we share our opposable thumbs and tool-using capabilities with several of our fellow primates. No, I would argue instead that the true thing that makes humans qualitatively different from other animals is our ability to use language.
    Though there are people who claim that various phenomena from dolphin sounds to bird songs are " language" these arguments are typically confusions in terminology at best. There is no doubt that these noises serve to communicate ideas from animal to animal, but to most linguists the idea of language involves a means of communicating that is more complex, rule-based, and extensible—able to capture complicated ideas even with a relatively limited vocabulary.
    Now, it seems reasonable to suppose that if human beings are several times more intelligent than these other creatures, our communications would be correspondingly more complex.
    However, I believe that the converse is actually the case that the appearance of great intelligence in human beings is partly a product of our natural affinity for language. Language acquisition is not merely a function of our general reasoning capabilities; it is accomplished by particular and unique regions of our brains during the first seven or so years of childhood. Anyone studying a second language knows how difficult it really is to achieve fluency in a foreign tongue using only our general cognitive abilities, after this "language acquisition device" has shut itself off.
    As much as we’d like to believe it, language is not mankind’s ingenious invention; it is our genetic birthright, and its acquisition is as instinctive and unconscious as salmon swimming upriver to spawn or geese flying south for the winter. Knowing this leads me to wonder: If other primates or dolphins could speak as we do, enabling them to share ideas and pass on their accumulated knowledge rather than learning it anew with each successive generation, would they really be so different from us?
The author of the passage would most probably agree that language is______.
选项 A、the primary distinguishing factor of humanity
B、a tool for preserving cultural identity
C、a useful adaptation for survival
D、an important topic for serious academic study
答案C
解析 推断题。A“人类最显著的特点”，A已经在文章中出现，不是推断出的内容，故A错误：B和D不符合文章，也是错误的。文章列举了大雁南飞的例子，说明语言学习也是一种本能的和下意识的行为；既然动物的这些行为是为了生存，人类语言作为一种行为同样可以帮助人类求得生存，故选C。
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