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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 Paragraphs 4 and 5 the author discusses that
选项 A、mastering Russian is the key to success in the Soviet Union.
B、citizens of China should focus on the acquisition of Mandarin.
C、English reaches its present global status as a world language.
D、languages face obvious threat in the shape of a political power.
答案D
解析 推理判断题。根据题干提示定位至第四、五段。第四段开头提到“甚至一些充满活力的语言也受到了因政治权力倾向而强制推行的主流语言的威胁”，接下来分别以苏联的俄语、中国的普通话和作为世界语言的英语为例，证明政治倾向对语言流行的影响。因而正确答案是[D]。
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