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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.
According to Paragraph 2, a new study finds that______.
选项 A、learning a new language can benefit a lot when you grow old
B、you have to learn a new language at a very young age
C、picking up a new language have few benefits later in life
D、picking up a new language can cause serious health problems
答案A
解析 根据题干关键词定位到第二段。文章第二段说道“《神经病学年报》公布的一项新的研究发现，你甚至不需要在你很小的时候就学习第二(或第三或第四)外语：即使后来才开始学习一种新的语言也对老化的大脑的认知能力有很大好处。”根据句义，可知A项为正确选项。B、C两项与题意相反，错误。此处需要注意的是，考生容易被最后一句话中serious误导，不仔细阅读的话，会误以为学习新语言会造成反面后果，而此serious修饰的是benefits，可知带来的是很大的好处。故D项错误。
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