Throughout history, people have been interested in knowing how languages first began, but no one knows exactly where or how this happened. However, we do know a lot about languages, the languages of today and also the languages of earlier times. There are probably about 3,000 languages in the world today. Chinese is the language with the most speakers. English, Russian and Spanish are also spoken by many millions of people. On the other hand, some languages in the world have less than one hundred speakers.

There are several important families of languages in the world. For example, most of the languages of Europe are in one large family called Indo-European. The original (最初的) language of this family was spoken about 4,500 years ago. Many of the present day languages of Europe and India are modern forms of the language of 4,500 yeas ago.

Languages are always changing. The English of today is very different from the English of 500 years ago. In time some even died out completely. About 1,000 years ago, English was a little-known relative of German spoken on one of the borders of Europe.

If a language has a large number of speakers or if it is very old, there may be differences in the way it is spoken in different areas. That is, the language may have several dialects. Chinese is a good example of dialect differences. Chinese has been spoken for thousands of years by many millions of speakers. The differences between the dialects of Chinese are so great that speakers of Chinese from some parts of China can’t understand speakers from other parts.

1 The first paragraph mainly tells us that ____ .

A. most people in the world speak Chinese

B. there are thousands of languages in the world today

C. man has much knowledge about languages

D. some people know several languages

2 According to the passage, most European and Indian languages ____ .

A. will soon die out completely    B. were once a relative of English

C. are no longer spoken              D. come from the same family

3 According to the passage, ____ has the most speakers.

A. Chinese         B. English          C. Spanish          D. German

4 According to the passage, ____ seems to have changed a lot.

A. German         B. English          C. Spanish         D. Chinese

5The underlined word dialect in the last paragraph probably means ____ .

A. a special language spoken by Chinese

B. the sign used by the Chinese people in a special area

C. the difference between the old and today’s Chinese

D. the form of a language used in one part of the country

 

All the wisdom of the ages and all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries are easily and cheaply available to all of us within the covers of books. The most unfortunate people in the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books.

Reading is the pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author's or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

Every book stands by itself, like a one--family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something. They are connected with each other and with other cities. Books influence each other; they link the past, the present and the future and have their own generations, like families. Wherever you start reading, you connect yourself with one of the families or ideas, and in the long run, you not only find out about the world and the people in it but also you find out about yourself, too.

Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you "you ought" to read, you probably won't have fun. But if you put down a book you don’t like and try another till you find one that means something to you, and then relax yourself with it, you will almost certainly have a good time  and if you become, as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won't have suffered during the process.

72. In the writer's opinion, in fact reading is a process of ________.

A. listening to the author                                   B. accepting the author's ideas

C. communicating with the author and yourself             D. judging the author's work

73. The writer thinks that the most unfortunate people are those _______.

A. who don't have any books                                  B. who can't enjoy reading books

C. who don’t like books                                     D. who read too many books

74. To find pleasure in reading, you should read the books _______.

A. written by famous writers                                             B. written in humor style

C. which you like to read                                     D. which are recommended by your friends

75. The author's purpose in writing the passage is to _______.

A. show the importance of reading                               B. tell us how to make reading more effective

C. tell us how to read                              D. show the pleasure of reading

72-75 CBCD

 

 

Why should I teach my children history? That sounds like a stupid question to even ask. But, as I hear different home schooling teachers discuss history, I get the idea that there may be different reasons for teaching history. Let me briefly explain the three good reasons for studying history and two bad reasons for studying history.

The major reason I see for studying history is that we can learn from the past. I am convinced that the world would be a much better place if more people understood the successes and failures of the past and the things that made these successes and failures. However, as the unfortunately true statement goes “the one thing we seem to learn from history is that we don’t seem to learn from history. ”Perhaps at least in teaching history, to my children I can do a small part in changing this.

A second major reason for studying history is that it is hard to understand the current political climate in the absence of an understanding of its historical context. We can not even understand who we are and where we are without history, much less try to figure out where we are going or how we should get where we want to be.

I teach my children history, for one more reason. I purchased a set of historical audio tapes for our children. My seven-year-old son listened to them over and over. It was my hope that he would become inspired by the accomplishments of people like the Wright brothers to accomplish things by himself. I think that it is good that we celebrate the accomplishments of people like Martin Luther King Jr. In doing so, young people are called on to stand for the principles that he stood for and accomplish what he accomplished. I also think that by studying people like Adolph Hitler, people can learn to stand against the things that he stood for.

1. What message can we get from the underlined sentence in Paragraph 2?

A. Many people aren’t clever enough to learn well from the past.

B. Many people fail to make good use of history and make the same mistakes.

C. Many people feel it hard to understand history.

D. Many people have no interest in studying history.

2. In Paragraph 3, the author shows that history is useful because

A. it makes the current political situation go smoothly

B. it helps us realize the importance of historical events

C. it helps us understand why things are the way they are

D. it helps people accept the present situation where they live

3. Some historical figures are mentioned in the last paragraph to show

A. people can be inspired to do good, while also learning to fight against evil

B. people may also learn from bad historical figures

C. more celebrations should be held to honor their achievements

D. today’s people can also achieve what they achieved

4. What would be talked about in the following paragraph?

A. How to teach history effectively.         

B. Some negative reasons for studying history.

C. How to get more people to study history.  

D. Some bad historical figures.

 

       Modern inventions have speeded up people’s lives amazingly. Motor-cars cover a hundred miles in little more than an hour, aircraft cross the world inside a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year motor-cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts (吹嘘) of saving precious seconds in handling tasks.

       All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jet-lag; our bodies feel that they have been left behind in another time zone. Again, spending too long at computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also have their dangers, according to some scientists; too much use may transmit harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence we do not like to think about.

       However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

       There was a time when some people’s lives were devoted simply to the cultivation of the land or the care of cattle. No multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced: they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone. Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence.

1.The new products become more and more time-saving because          .

       A. time is limited                                            B. our love of speed seems never-ending     

       C. the prices are increasingly high                      D. the manufacturers boast a lot

2.What does “the days” in Paragraph 3 refer to?

       A. Simple life in the past.                                 B. Imaginary life.                              

       C. Times of inventions.                                     D. Time for constant activity.

3.What is the author’s attitude towards the modern technology?

       A. Objective.                B. Critical.                   C. Optimistic.               D. Negative.

4.What does the passage mainly discuss?

       A. Machinery and human beings.                       B. The present and past times.                    

C. Imaginations and inventions.                         D. Modern technology and its influence.

 

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