3. According to the passage, which is right?

A. The punctual person has no much work to do.

B. The unpunctual person is very rich. (from )

C. The unpunctual person is often respected by his friends.

D. The unpunctual person loses what can’t be regained again.

2. Why is unpunctuality very harmful?

A. Because it makes a man lose many chances of doing important affairs.

B. Because it makes a man lose friends.

C. Because it makes a man work quickly.

D. Because it makes a man be more respected by others.

1. What is an unpunctual person like?

A. He always does a thing when it should be done.　　 B. He is always very busy.

C. He always does a thing at the wrong time.　　　　 D. He always keeps the appointments.

4. What is the text mainly about?

A. The relationship between accents and social classes.

B. The Queen’s Christmas speeches on TV.

C. The changes in a person’s accent.

D. The recent development of the English language.

B

A punctual person is in the habit of doing a thing at the proper time and is never late in keeping an appointment.

The unpunctual man, on the other hand, never does what he has to do at the proper time. He is always in a hurry and in the end loses both time and his good name. A lost thing may be found again, but lost time can never be regained. Time is more valuable than material things. In fact, time is life itself. The unpunctual man is for ever wasting and mismanaging his most valuable asset as well as others’. The unpunctual person is always complaining that he finds no time to answer letters, or return calls or keep appointments promptly. But the man who really has a great deal to do is very careful of his time and seldom complains of want of it. He knows that he can not get through huge amount of work unless he faithfully keeps every piece of work when it has to be attended to.

Failure to be punctual in keeping one’s appointments is a sign of disrespect towards others. If a person is invited to dinner and arrives later than the appointed time, he keeps all the other guests waiting for him. Usually this will be regarded as a great disrespect to the host and all other guests present.

Unpunctuality, moreover, is very harmful when it comes to doing one’s duty, whether public or private. Imagine how it would be if those who are put in charge of important tasks failed to be at their proper place at the appointed time. A man who is known to be habitually unpunctual is never trusted by his friends or fellow men.　

3. We may infer from the text that the Journal of Phonetics is a magazine on _________.

A. speech sounds　　　　　　　 　　　　　　　　　 B. Christmas customs

C. TV broadcasting　　　　　 　　　　　　　 　　　 D. personal messages

2. Which of the following is an example of a less noble accent in English?

　A. “duaty”　 　　　　　　　　　　 B. “citee”　　　 　　　　　 C. “hame”　　　　 D. “lorst”

1. The Queen’s broadcasts were chosen for the study mainly because ______.

　A. she has been Queen for many years

　B. she has a less upper-class accent now

C. her speeches are familiar to many people

D. her speeches have been recorded for 50 years

4. What would be the best title for the passage?

　A. Two Astronauts　　　　 B. Flight STS-51-L

C. Travelling in Space　　　 D. The Training Programme

第83天　　　　　　　　　　　　　 A

The Queen’s English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts had found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard Received.

Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany’s University of Munich, wanted to discover whether accent (口音) changers recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. “As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records,” he said.

He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels (元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-class accent over the past years. “Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very small and slow changes that we don’t notice from year to year.”

“We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. “In 1952 she would have been heard saying ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. And ‘hame’ rather than ‘home’. In the 1950s she would have been ‘lorst’, but by the 1970s ‘lost’.”

The Queen’s broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each Christmas, the 10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch. (传统火鸡午餐).

The results were published (发表) in the Journal of Phonetics.

3. The reason why there was great interest in Flight STS-51-L is that ________.

A. both Christa and Judy got PhD degrees in the same year

B. a young secondary school teacher was on the flight

C. students were going to learn more about space travel

D. it was the first time for women to travel in space

2. Christa McAuliffe was chosen for training because _______.

A. she was popular with the news media

B. she expected to give history lessons in space

C. she was an excellent teacher and communicator

D. she made the students in space very excited