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  3. One of the odd stories to come out of the French-speaking province of Quebec last year was the announcement that intensive Engli

One of the odd stories to come out of the French-speaking province of Quebec last year was the announcement that intensive Engli

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问题     One of the odd stories to come out of the French-speaking province of Quebec last year was the announcement that intensive English courses would be offered to students in state schools. Odd, because in the past half-century, much of the Quebecois identity has been built on resisting English. Authorities throw the book at people for doing things that would be normal elsewhere in Canada. Last autumn, the Montreal newspaper La Presse revealed that two real estate executives had made presentations in English to a Montreal-based pension fund, violating the province’s language laws, which give workers the right to a French-speaking environment.
    Now, school authorities in Quebec City are questioning whether the time is ripe for introducing those English classes after all. Their hesitation has left French-speaking parents angry. On one hand, those parents want their children to cherish their own community and its language. On the other hand, English is the international language of business, and their children will have a hard time climbing the social ladder without it.
    Not all cultures have the same historical anguish over English that Quebecois do. But almost all are being dragged inevitably towards giving English a bigger role in their societies. So now we can all talk, we peoples of the world. The universalisation of English has happy consequences. But like the building of the Tower of Babel, it has negative ones, too. English as a lingua franca offers unfair advantages to the half-billion people who speak English as a native language. We sometimes assume that English is a world standard only for superficial interactions—hotel personnel saying "How was your stay?" or business consultants importing words like "benchmarking" into their own languages. But French and German professors, for instance, often grumble that it is hard to build a career when academic journals are all in English.
    Meanwhile, there can be a diversity-stifling effect to "diversity". When universities teach classes in global English, they can adorn their student bodies with exotic people from around the world—the most talented ones, the flower of their respective cultures. But the net effect can be to turn these varied young people into extremely unvaried adults. Language shapes mentalities—how deeply is harder to say. But the spread of English may be limiting our ability to think in different ways.
    The writer Robert McCrum wrote in his recent book Globish that there are 4bn people who understand English, if we’re generous about what we mean by English. One can only rub one’s eyes. The population of the planet reached that level in 1974, just seven years before Fran ois Mitterrand came to power in France. His culture minister, Jack Lang, waged a fight against the linguistic imperialism of English. A later government would specify that 40 per cent of popular songs on the radio had to be in French. That law gave rise to a lot of laughter in Washington and London. It doesn’t seem quite so crazy as it did back then.
Paragraph 4 shows that teaching classes in global English______.
选项 A、excludes less talented people from universities
B、is harmful to mentality of young people
C、leads to deficiency of differences in individual thinking
D、can produce negative thinking behaviours
答案C
解析 第四段末句明确指出英语的扩大化使得人们思维方式受到局限，也即，会导致个性化思维方式减少，故[C]选项正确。
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考研英语一

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