2. 外语
  3. Languages will continue to diverse. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different fo

Languages will continue to diverse. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different fo

admin2012-12-26  29
问题     Languages will continue to diverse. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different forms. Indeed the same could happen to English as has happened to Chinese: a language of intellectuals which doesn’t vary hugely alongside a large number of variations used by local peoples.
    We will continue to teach other languages in some form, and not just for reasons of practical use. Learning a language is good for your mental health; it forces you to understand another cultural and intellectual system. So I hope British education will develop a more rational approach to the foreign languages available to students in line with their political importance. Because so many people believe it’s no longer important to know another language, I fear that time devoted to language teaching in schools may well continue to decline. But you can argue that learning another language well is more exhausting than, say, learning to play chess well—it involves sensitivity to a set of complicated rules, and also to context.
    Technology will certainly make a difference to the use of foreign languages. Computers may, for instance, relieve the hard work that a vast translation represents. But no one who has seen a computer translation will think it can substitute for live knowledge of the different languages. A machine will always be behind the times. Still more important is the fact that no computer will ever get at the associations beyond the words associations that may not be expressed but which carry much of the meaning. In languages like Arabic that context is very important. Languages come with heavy cultural baggage too—in French or German if you miss the cultural references behind a word you’re very likely to be missing the meaning. It will be very hard to teach all that to a computer.
    All the predictions are that English will be spoken by a declining proportion of the world’s population in the 21st century. I don’t think foreign languages will really become less important, but they might be perceived to be—and that would in the end be—a very bad thing.
By saying "languages come with heavy cultural baggage", the author means that ______.
选项 A、much unnecessary cultural background blocks the understanding of a language
B、a language usually contains important cultural traditions and custom
C、it is a burden for a language learner to understand the related culture
D、the understanding of a language is affected by the various contexts it is in
答案B
解析 词义推断题。本题主要考查baggage一词的理解。baggage带有“惯例、传统”的意思，但这个意思并不包括在考纲词汇里。baggage虽有“包袱、累赘”之义，但从文中可见，baggage是与前一句中的context同样重要的东西，都能影响对语言的理解，因此，作者使用这个词并无贬义, 由此可否定选项A和C。从baggage后的too一词可推断，baggage是与context不同的影响理解语言的因素，由此也可否定选项D。
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