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How do scientists estimate the age of language?

admin2015-03-11  24
问题 How do scientists estimate the age of language?
Scientists have borrowed a technique from biology to calculate the age of our mother tongue. They say the Indo-European languages emerged more than 9,000 years ago. Languages evolve much as animals do, words gradually change over time just as gene evolves in the living beings.So a biologist in New Zealand decided to use the mathematical tools developed to estimate the age of living species to study the evolution of our mother tongue. He and a colleague studied 2,400 words in more than 80 so-called Indo-European languages. The researchers now report in Nature that these languages started out as a common tongue more than 9,000 years ago. That’s consistent with other research dating our root language. According to that hypothesis, Indo-Europeans started out in Anatolia, which is present-day Turkey, and spread through Europe as farmers settled the land.
选项 A、By studying animals’ evolution.
B、By studying human genes.
C、By using mathematical tools.
D、By using the age of living species.
答案C
解析 细节判断题。听本段新闻时，一定要注意原话的表述内容，不能只凭借只言片语来作答，那样往往会落入出题人的陷阱。新闻的第一句话是说：“科学家们借用一种生物学的技术计算出了人类母语的历史。”关键的点在于calculate这个单词，而不是biology，所以不能选A和D两项。新闻中的另外一个句子表述要更加清晰，即“一位新西兰生物学家决定用能推测出生物种类存在时间的数学方法来研究人类母语演变的历史”，根据这点，我们能够确定正确的选项是C项。
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