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  3. A World Without Time or Number The Piraha is an isolated Amazonian tribe of hunter-gatherers who live deep in the Brazilian

A World Without Time or Number The Piraha is an isolated Amazonian tribe of hunter-gatherers who live deep in the Brazilian

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问题                                 A World Without Time or Number
    The Piraha is an isolated Amazonian tribe of hunter-gatherers who live deep in the Brazilian rainforest. The tribe has survived for centuries, although there are now only around 200 people left. The Piraha, who communicate mainly through hums and whistles, have fascinated ethnologists for years, mainly because they have almost no words for numbers. They use only three words to count: one, two, and many.
    We know about the Piraha thanks to Dan Everett, a professor of phonetics, who spent seven years with the tribe in the 1970s and 1980s. Everett discovered a world without numbers, without time, without words for colours, without subordinate clauses and without a past tense. Their language, he found, was not just simple grammatically; it was restricted in its range of sounds and differed between the sexes. For the men, it has just eight consonants and three vowels; for the women, who have the smallest number of speech sounds in the world, it has seven consonants and three vowels. To the untutored ear, the language sounds more like humming than speech. The Piraha can also whistle their language, which is how men communicate when hunting.
    Their culture is similarly constrained. The Piraha can’t write, have little collective memory, and no concept of decorative art. In 1980 Everett tried to teach them to count: he explained basic arithmetic to an enthusiastic group keen to learn the skills needed to trade with other tribes. After eight months, not one could count to ten; even one plus one was beyond them. The experiment seemed to confirm Everett’s theory: the tribe just couldn’t conceive the concept of number.
    The Piraha’s inability to count is important because it seems to disprove Noam Chomsky’s influential Theory of Universal Grammar, which holds that the human mind has a natural capacity for language, and that all languages share a basic rule structure, which enables children to understand abstract concepts such as number.
    The Piraha is a tribe who has lived in the Brazilian rainforest for hundreds of years.
    They communicate just with【R1】________. This has made many ethnologists interested in them. Their language is very special, not only because it is simple【R2】________, but also because it is different【R3】________the sexes. Men and women acquire different【R4】________. Although a professor of phonetics had tried to teach them【R5】________, he failed. This seems to disprove Noam Chomsky’s influential Theory of Universal Grammar.
【R4】
选项
答案consonants and vowels
解析 由第二段第四句“For the men, it has just eight consonants and three vowels; for the women, who have the smallest number of speech sounds in the world, it has seven consonants and three vowels”可知，此处应填consonants and vowels。
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本试题收录于： C类竞赛（非英语专业本科）题库大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）分类
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C类竞赛（非英语专业本科）

大学生英语竞赛（NECCS）

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