5. According to this passage, British people and Americans have
__________ difficulty in understanding each other.
A. little B.
much
C. some D.
great
[解析] 本文第三段意在指明：尽管英式英语和美式英语在几个方面有些不同，但大体来说，它们仍同属一种语言。所以说英国人和美国人相互理解起来也没有多大的困难。
[答案] A
C
If you ask people to name the one person who had the greatest effect
on the English language, you will get answers like“Shakespeare”“Samuel Johnson” and“Webster”, but none of these men had any effect at all compared to a man who
didn’t even speak English --William the Conqueror.
Before 1066, in the land we now call Great Britain lived people
belonging to two major language groups. In the west-central region in the
Welsh, who spoke a Celtic language, and in the north lived the Scots, whose
language, thought not the same as Welsh, was also Celtic. In the rest of the
country lived the Saxons, actually a mixture of Anglos, Saxons, and other
Germanic and Nordic peoples, who spoke what we now call Anglo-Saxon (or Old
English), a Germanic language. If this state of affairs had lasted, English today
would be close to German.
But this state of affairs did not last. In 1066 the Normans led by
William defeated the Saxons and began their rule over England. For about a
century, French became the official language of England while Old English
became the language of peasant. As a result, English words of politics and the
law come from French rather than German. In some cases, modern English even
shows a distinction(区别)between upper-class French and
lower-class Anglo-Saxon in its words. We even have different words for some
foods, meat in particular, depending on whether it is still out in the fields
or at home ready to be cooked, which shows the fact that the Saxon peasants
were doing farming, while the upper-class Normans were doing most of the eating.
When Americans visit Europe for the first time, they usually find
Germany more “foreign” than
France because the German they see on signs and advertisements seems much more
different from English than French does. Few realize that the English language
is actually Germanic in its beginning and that the French influences are all
the result of one man’s ambition.