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  3. The rise of English is a remarkable success story. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English d

The rise of English is a remarkable success story. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English d

admin2010-05-26  195
问题     The rise of English is a remarkable success story. When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not exist.  Five hundred years later, English, incomprehensible to modern ears, was probably spoken by about as few people as currently speak Cherokee (an American Indian language)-and with about as little influence. Nearly a thousand years later, at the end of sixteenth century, when William Shakespeare was in his prime, English was the native speech of between five and seven million English people and it was, in the words of a contemporary, "of small reach, it stretched no further than this island of ours, never not there over all. "
    Four hundred years later, the contrast is extraordinary. Between 1600 and the present, in armies, navies, companies, and expeditions, the speakers of English-including Scots, Irish, Welsh, American, and many more-traveled into every corner of the globe, carrying their language and culture with them. Today English is used by at least 750 million people, and barely half of those speak it as a mother tongue. Some estimates have put that figure Closer to one billion. Whatever the total, English at the end of the twentieth century is more widely scattered, more widely spoken and written, than any other language has ever been. It has become the language of the planet, the first truly global language.
    The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world’s languages, it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious (简明) Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. About 350 million people use the English vocabulary as a mother tongue: about one tenth of the world’s population, scattered across every continent and surpassed, in numbers, though not in distribution, only by the speakers of the many varieties of Chinese. Three quarters of world’s mail, and its telexes and cables, are in English. So are more than half the world’s technical and scientific periodicals: it is the language of technology from Silicon Valley to Shanghai.
When did English appear as a language spoken by few people?
选项 A、In Julius Caesar’s time.
B、In Shakespeare’s time.
C、2000 years ago.
D、2500 years ago.
答案D
解析 见第一段"When Julius Caesar landed in Britain nearly two thousand years ago, English did not  exist. Five hundred years later, English, incomprehensible to modern ears, was probably spoken  by about as few people as... "
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