剑桥雅思阅读4(test2)原文翻译及答案解析

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2024年6月15日发(作者：)

剑桥雅思阅读4(test2)原文翻译及答案解析

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剑桥雅思阅读4原文(test2)

READING PASSAGE 1

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on

Reading Passage 1 below.

Lost for words

Many minority languages are on the danger list

In the Native American Navajo nation, which sprawls across four states in the

American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are

middle-aged or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools

are run in English. Street signs, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper

are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of

Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time.

Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish

within two generations — that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before

has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. ‘At the moment, we

are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world,’ says Mark

Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. ‘It’s a mass

extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’

Isolation breeds linguistic diversity: as a result, the world is peppered with

languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 languages have more than a

million speakers, and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these

small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered

despite having 150,000 speakers. What makes a language endangered is not just

the number of speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is

relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken

by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language

Center, in Fairbanks.

Why do people reject the language of their parents? It begins with a crisis of

confidence, when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier

society, says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages,

in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says. ‘When the next generation

reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

The change is not always voluntary. Quite often, governments try to kill off a

minority language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in schools,

all to promote national unity. The former US policy of running Indian reservation

schools in English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the

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