62.
Where can you most probably read this passage?
A. In a travel guide book． B.
On a university bulletin board．
C. In a health magazine. D.
In a doctor's prescription.
(C)
It's not a new phenomenon,
but have you noticed how many nouns are being used as verbs? We all use them,
often without noticing what we're doing.
I was arranging to meet
someone for dinner last week, and I said “I’ll pencil it in my diary”, and my
friend said “You can ink it in”, meaning that it was a firm arrangement not a
tentative one!
Many of these new verbs are linked to new
technology. An obvious example is the word fax, which is a shortening of
facsimile originally, an exact copy of a book or document. We all got used to
sending and receiving faxes, and then soon started talking about faxing
something and promising we'd fax it immediately. So, nouns turn into verbs in
two easy stages. Then along came email, and we were soon all emailing each
other madly. How did we do without it? I can hardly imagine life without my
daily emails.
Email reminds me, of course， of
my computer and its software, which has produced another
couple
of new verbs. On my computer I can bookmark those pages from the World Wide Web
that I think I'll want to look at again, thus saving all the effort of
remembering their addresses and calling them up from scratch. I can do the same
thing on my PC, but there I don't bookmark; I favorite-coming from “favorite
pages”, so the verb is derived from an adjective not a noun． I
wasn’t really sure whether people said this，but someone told me
recently that they had favorited a site I was looking
for and so they could easily give me its address.
In the late 1980s I noticed
that lots of my friends had acquired pagers, and kept saying things like “I’ll
page you as soon as I know what time we’re meeting”. They couldn't say it to
me, though; 1 refused to have one． So my children bought me a mobile phone, now
known simply as a mobile and I had to learn yet more new verbs. I can message
someone, that is, I can leave a message (either spoken or
written)for them on their phone．Or I can text them,
write a few words suggesting when and where to meet, for example. How long will
it be before I can mobile them, that is, phone them using my mobile? I haven’t
heard that verb yet, but I’m sure I will soon. Perhaps I’ll start using it
myself! (415)
(D)