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  3. "Internet" has created a new vocabulary that has come to represent a historical era of change. Ask John Morse, publisher of Merr

"Internet" has created a new vocabulary that has come to represent a historical era of change. Ask John Morse, publisher of Merr

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问题     "Internet" has created a new vocabulary that has come to represent a historical era of change. Ask John Morse, publisher of Merriam-Webster Dictionaries, to name the word that defines the close of the millennium and he doesn’t hesitate: "Internet". "No other word has become part of people’s lives so quickly or has had such an impact," he says. The Internet has swept into the American vocabulary and given birth to so many new words and phrases — "netizen," "chatroom" and "homepage" among them — that it has come to represent an era in social history, he says. And remarkably, "Internet" has managed to become the most significant word of the century in less than a decade. "We first started seeing a number of citations in 1994, and by 1998 it was established in the dictionary," Morse says, "It was just astounding. No other new word has gained such widespread acceptance so quickly," he says.
    Just a century ago, another form of communication swept into the language. In the 1898 edition of "Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary," the hot new word was "telephone". "It brought massive social change and reshaped the way people did business, just as the Internet is doing today," Mores says. "Telephone" was no easy linguistic act to follow. It helped bring into popular usage a wide range of new words and phrases — busy signals, wrong numbers, voice mail, cell phones. It also gave the United States its standard greeting: Hello. But "Internet" is holding its own, in part by borrowing words from older technologies and giving them new meaning, such as "bookmark," "copy" and "browser."
    "That is how vocabulary evolves," Mores says. "It’s human nature to make the concept easier to understand by using a familiar, in this case print-based, metaphor." Allan Metcalf, a professor at MacMurray College in Illinois, helps put together a list of words of the year for the American Dialect Society. He says the word "Internet" is a strong candidate to define the end of the century, but he has another preference: words with the prefix e-, as "e-mail" or "e-commerce." "It has a little more impact and it conveys attitudes," Metcalf says.
    At Merriam, new words earn a place in the dictionary simply by repeated use in popular press. Merriam’s lexicographers append a large part of their day reading newspapers, magazines, and now Internet publications. Each new word — along with a copy from the publication showing how it was used — goes into an electronic database.
The author cited the emergence of the word "telephone" in order to ______.
选项 A、show it came into the English language very quickly
B、define a linguistic act that occurred a century ago
C、compare its impact with the great influence of the word "Internet"
D、illustrate how people used language a century ago
答案C
解析 文章第一段介绍了互联网因其进入人们生活速度之快，影响之大而成为上世 纪末的流行词。在第二段又提到了“电话”是如何在上世纪初成为普遍流行的单词的。其 中引用了John Morse的一句话”It brought massive social change and reshaped the way people did business，just as the Internet is doing today．”这说明作者的本意是将电话当时对人们生活 产生的影响和今天的互联网对人们产生的影响进行比较。
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