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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.
Why the prefix "e-" is Allan Metcalf’s favorite when he talked about the words to define the end of the century?
选项 A、e- is more popular than any other word.
B、e- means electronic.
C、He thinks "e-" is often used in people’s communication.
D、e- is often used online.
答案C
解析 在文章中e-是相对Internet而言的，认为Internet能体现本世纪特色，是因为 它在语言交流中被大量使用。
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