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  3. The venerable 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains about 700,000 words, but the editors recently realized they were miss

The venerable 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains about 700,000 words, but the editors recently realized they were miss

admin2014-01-07  45
问题     The venerable 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains about 700,000 words, but the editors recently realized they were missing one: Doh!
    The cartoon character Homer Simpson’s forehead-smacking lament is one of some 250 entries being added today to the dictionary, which is widely considered the leading authority on the English language.
    "Doh" is now defined as "Expressing frustration at the realization that things have turned out badly or not as planned, or that one has just said or done something foolish," according to the new entry in the dictionary.
    The Simpsons only popularized the term; it was actually used extensively in the 1950s, the OED found. Although it is often spelled "D’oh," the dictionary chose to omit the apostrophe.
    Other newcomers to the dictionary include cheesy, which means second-rate or inferior; six-pack, meaning rippling abdominal muscles, and Bollywood, which refers to the Hindi film industry based in Bombay, India.
    "We’ll have terms from immuno-biology to gangster rap," says Jesse Sheidlower, who is head of the project for North America.
    The OED’s staff of 50 editors is wading through popular culture looking for new words and usages that merit an entry, as part of its 8-year-old million updating project. It is the first complete revision of the dictionary since it was completed in 1928.
    "The principle way we get new entries is to have readers look around the world for things that seem new or significant," says John Simpson, chief editor of the OED. Contributors have included a Nobel laureate and an inmate at an insane asylum, among thousands of others.
    "We have about 200,000 example sentences coming into the department each year."
    Simpson(John, not Homer)and Ms colleagues whittle that list down to the few that seem to have got a solid foothold in popular usage. He says his job also gives him an excuse to watch a lot of action films, soap operas and quiz shows, to look for more new terms.
    "Many terms are much older than you think they are," says Sheidlower.
    "Phat," for example, makes its debut in the OED today as a slang term meaning cool.
    But it has been African-American slang since at least the 1960s, OED researchers found. The word even appeared with its present meaning in Time magazine in 1963.
    The dictionary contains some surprises for people who think they are using the latest, cutting-edge jargon.
According to the last paragraph, what surprises will the dictionary bring to the people?
选项 A、There will be the most novel and popular words in the dictionary.
B、People will realize they are not as fashionable as they imagine.
C、There will be most helpful words for those who want to be trendy.
D、People will realize they are not as knowledgeable as they think.
答案B
解析 倒数第4段可以说是这4段的主题句。因此，最后一段的surprises应该是指字典里的词并不如人们想象的那么新，因此，认识这些词的人也就并不是他们想象的那么时髦了，可见，本题应选B。注意最后一段的定语从句限定了题目针对什么样的人，其中的latest和cutting-edge表明该句中的人与“时髦”有关，而与是否“有知识”无关，这样就排除D；A是原文一直以来强调的词典的特点，但不能算是surprise；C虽然有trendy一词与“时髦”有关，但整个句子偏离了最后4段的意思。
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