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  3. Bilingual education in schools has long been a political hot potato—it was banned in California by a 1998 ballot measure, which

Bilingual education in schools has long been a political hot potato—it was banned in California by a 1998 ballot measure, which

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问题    Bilingual education in schools has long been a political hot potato—it was banned in California by a 1998 ballot measure, which the state Senate is now asking voters to repeal. But politics aside, there’s an increasing amount of scientific support for the benefits of knowing at least two languages.
   Now, a new study published by the Annals of Neurology finds that you don’t even need to learn that second (or third, or fourth) tongue at a very young age: Picking up a new language even a little later in life can have serious cognitive benefits for the aging brain.
   Many recent studies have pointed out that bilingualism seems to be good exercise for the brain and later in life might even help delay the onset of dementia. But what if it’s a self-selecting crowd? What if the people who learned two languages are just smarter to begin with? To help rule that factor out, researchers at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland studied 853 people who first took an intelligence test in 1947 when they were about 11 years old as part of a group called the Lothian Birth Cohort 1936, and retested them again around 2008 to 2010, when they were in their early 70s.
   A total of 262 of the seventy-year-old reported having learned at least one language other than English enough to communicate in it. Of those, 195 said they learned it before age 18; 65 said they learned it thereafter. The researchers gave the participants a battery of cognitive tests, including tests of their verbal reasoning, their vocabulary and reading abilities, their verbal fluency and their ability to process information quickly. They found that bilingual speakers performed much better than expected from their baseline cognitive ability, particularly in reading and in general intelligence. And those who knew three or more languages performed even better.
   Learning a language seemed to make as much difference in people’s later-in-life cognitive decline as a gene that’s been tied to risk of Alzheimer’s disease and smoking habits.
   These participants mostly learned their second languages after age 11. The results actually make a very compelling point—you don’t have to be a fluent speaker of a language to get the benefits, and you can start later in life, too.
   
The text mainly discusses______.
选项 A、bilingual education in schools
B、how to learn a new language
C、the best time to learn a new language
D、advantages of learning a new language
答案D
解析 主旨题。答对此题需要考生对全文有一个清晰的认识和理解。文章首段指出，双语教学在政治上一直以来就是个棘手问题，但是抛开政治，近年来越来越多的科学研究证明学习多种语言是有好处的。第二段开始提到一项新的研究表明即使后来才开始学习一门新的语言，也会对衰老的大脑有益。接下来两段具体讲了实验的研究方法和研究结果。最后两段进一步指出研究表明，学习一门新的语言对大脑有益。可见文章主要讲学习一门新语言的好处。因此D项为正确选项。
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