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  3. Think of the loneliness felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last pers

Think of the loneliness felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last pers

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问题     Think of the loneliness felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974—he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed.
    Does it matter? Plenty of languages—among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chib-cha—have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to posterity. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues—from Manchu(spoken in China)to Hua(Botswana)and Gwich’in(Alaska)—are in danger of suffering a similar fate?
    Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicise an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6,900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and South-East Asia.
    Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realised that whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian was the key to success; citizens of China face similar pressure to focus on Mandarin, the main Chinese dialect.
    Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language.
    But in an age of mass communications, the threats to linguistic diversity are less crucial and more spontaneous. Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language(such as Swahili in East Africa)or a global one(such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by films and computer games.
In the future, the number of languages will
选项 A、stop decreasing.
B、begin to increase.
C、continue to decrease.
D、stop increasing.
答案C
解析 推理判断题。本题需要对全文综合理解。首先，在历史上就存在语言消逝的现象；其次，近年来这一消逝开始加速；最后，虽然最后一段开头提到“在大众传播工具盛行的时代，语言多样化所受威胁的严峻性降低，自发性提高”，但是依然说明了语言选择趋向集中的事实和趋势，所以正确答案是[C]。
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