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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.
It can be concluded from the study that______.
选项 A、the bilingual speakers perform worse than those who only know one language
B、learning a language may have the risk of Alzheimer’ s disease or smoking habits
C、people have to speak a new language fluently in order to gain some benefits
D、people can start to learn a new language later in life and still get the benefits
答案D
解析 本题可使用排除法。A项是主观臆断，根据第四段倒数第二句话，“双语学习者的基础认知能力表现的比预期好得多”，因此A项错误。B项说“学习一门语言会有老年痴呆症和吸烟习惯的危险”，而原文意思是“学习一门语言所起到的作用就和控制老年痴呆症和吸烟习惯的基因一样重要”，因此B项错误。C、D两项的相关信息都是来自于最后一段最后一句话，原文意思是“学习一门语言，你不必说得很流利，大脑也可以受益，并且，你完全可以晚一些再学习新的语言”。而C项说，“为了使大脑受益，必须能够很流利地讲一门新的语言”，与原文意思不符，因此C项错误。D项“人们可以晚一些再学习新的语言，大脑仍然可以受益”为正确选项。
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