2. 外语
  3. At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing th

At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing th

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问题     At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing that separates humans from the animals is..." You may have even heard such a sentiment completed in more than one way—some say it is our large brains, others our opposable thumbs, and still others claim it is our ability to use tools. While all of these attributes sound reasonable enough, none of them is truly unique to the human species. There are plenty of large mammals that have bigger brains than human beings, and we share our opposable thumbs and tool-using capabilities with several of our fellow primates. No, I would argue instead that the true thing that makes humans qualitatively different from other animals is our ability to use language.
    Though there are people who claim that various phenomena from dolphin sounds to bird songs are " language" these arguments are typically confusions in terminology at best. There is no doubt that these noises serve to communicate ideas from animal to animal, but to most linguists the idea of language involves a means of communicating that is more complex, rule-based, and extensible—able to capture complicated ideas even with a relatively limited vocabulary.
    Now, it seems reasonable to suppose that if human beings are several times more intelligent than these other creatures, our communications would be correspondingly more complex.
    However, I believe that the converse is actually the case that the appearance of great intelligence in human beings is partly a product of our natural affinity for language. Language acquisition is not merely a function of our general reasoning capabilities; it is accomplished by particular and unique regions of our brains during the first seven or so years of childhood. Anyone studying a second language knows how difficult it really is to achieve fluency in a foreign tongue using only our general cognitive abilities, after this "language acquisition device" has shut itself off.
    As much as we’d like to believe it, language is not mankind’s ingenious invention; it is our genetic birthright, and its acquisition is as instinctive and unconscious as salmon swimming upriver to spawn or geese flying south for the winter. Knowing this leads me to wonder: If other primates or dolphins could speak as we do, enabling them to share ideas and pass on their accumulated knowledge rather than learning it anew with each successive generation, would they really be so different from us?
The word "birthright"(Paragraph 5)suggests that language is______.
选项 A、inherited rather than earned
B、common rather than unique
C、artificial rather than natural
D、cultural rather than universal
答案A
解析 细节推断题。第五段第一句话的后半部分“语言习得如大雁南飞，是出于本能的，潜意识的”，其中instinct和unconscious实际上与前面的genetic birthright相照应，三个词所要表达的信息一致，即语言习得并非刻意行为。A选项的意思与原文相符，B、C和D所表现的特点在文中均未提到，故选A。
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