首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France,
It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France,
admin
2010-03-25
30
问题
It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France, the headquarters of the global battle against American cultural hegemony. If French guys are giving in to English, something really big must be going on. And something big is going on.
Partly, it’s that American hegemony. Didier Benchimol, CEO of a French e-commerce software company, feels compelled to speak English perfectly because the Internet software business is dominated by Americans. He and other French businessmen also have to speak English because they want to get their message out to American investors, possessors of the world’s deepest pockets.
The triumph of English in France and elsewhere in Europe, however, may rest on something more enduring. As they become entwined with each other politically and economically, Europeans need a way to talk to one another and to the rest of the world. And for a number of reasons, they’ve decided upon English as their common tongue.
So when German chemical and pharmaceutical company Hoechst merged with French competitor Rhone-Poulenc last year, the companies chose the vaguely Latinate Aventis as the new company name -- and settled on English as the company’s common language. When monetary policymakers from around Europe began meeting at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last year to set interest rates for the new Euroland, they held their deliberations in English. Even the European Commission, with 11 official languages and a traditionally French-speaking bureaucracy, effectively switched over to English as its working language last year.
How did this happen? One school attributes English’s great success to the sheer weight of its merit. It’s a Germanic language, brought to Britain around the fifth century A.D. During the four centuries of French-speaking rule that followed Norman Conquest of 1066, the language morphed into something else entirely. French words were added wholesale, and most of the complications of Germanic grammar were shed while few of the complications of French were added. The result is a language with a huge vocabulary and a simple grammar that can express most things more efficiently than either of its parents. What’s more, English has remained ungoverned and open to change -- foreign words, coinages, and grammatical shifts -- in a way that French, ruled by the purist Academic Francaise, has not.
So it’s a swell language, especially for business. But the rise of English over the past few centuries clearly owes at least as much to history and economics as to the language’s ability to economically express the concept win-win. What happened is that the competition- first Latin, then French, then, briefly, German -- faded with the waning of the political, economic, and military fortunes of, respectively, the Catholic Church, France, and Germany. All along, English was increasing in importance: Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and London the world’s most important financial centre, which made English a key language for business. England’s colonies around the world also made it the language with the most global reach. And as that former colony the US rose to the status of the world’s preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power, English became the obvious second language to learn.
In the 1990s more and more Europeans found themselves forced to use English. The last generation of business and government leaders who hadn’t studied English in school was leaving the stage. The European Community was adding new members and evolving from a paper-shuffling club into a serious regional government that would need a single common language if it were ever to get anything done. Meanwhile, economic barriers between European nations have been disappearing, meaning that more and more companies are beginning to look at the whole continent as their domestic market. And then the Internet came along.
The Net had two big impacts. One was that it was an exciting, potentially lucrative new industry that had its roots in the US, so if you wanted to get in on it, you had to speak some English. The other was that by surfing the Web, Europeans who had previously encountered English only in school and in pop songs were now coming into contact with it daily.
None of this means English has taken over European life. According to the European Union, 47% of Western Europeans (including the British and Irish) speak English well enough to carry on a conversation. That’s a lot more than those who can speak German (32%) or French (28%), but it still means more Europeans don’t speak the language. If you want to sell shampoo or cell phones, you have to do it in French or German or Spanish or Greek. Even the US and British media companies that stand to benefit most from the spread of English have been hedging their bets CNN broadcasts in Spanish; the Financial Times has recently launched a daily German-language edition.
But just look at who speaks English: 77% of Western European college students, 69% of managers, and 65% of those aged 15 to 24. In the secondary schools of the European Union’s non-English-speaking countries, 91% of students study English, all of which means that the transition to English as the language of European business hasn’t been all that traumatic, and it’s only going to get easier in the future.
Europeans began to favour English for all the following reasons EXCEPT its
选项
A、inherent linguistic properties.
B、association with the business world.
C、links with the United States.
D、disassociation from political changes.
答案
D
解析
第五、六段讲了欧洲人爱用英语的原因。比如,英语词汇量大而语法简单(选项 A);由于英国是工业革命的发源地,伦敦是世界金融中心,故英语成为商务主要语言(选项B);美国的崛起(选项C)。惟独选项D不是原因之一。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/wXqO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Aboutthreehundredyearsago,therewereapproximatelyhalfabillionpeopleintheworld.Inthetwocenturiesthatfollowedt
Weallhaveproblemsandbarriersthatblockourprogressorpreventusfrommovingintonewareas.Ourproblemsmightincludet
Extract1Simplyput,anewspapereditorialisanarticlethatexpressesanopinion.Whilethissinglesentencemaynotseem
Next,let’stalkaboutearthquakesonourPlanet.Somecountrieshavelargenumbersofearthquakes.Japanisoneofthem.Others
TheatmospherethatoriginallysurroundedEarthwasprobablymuchdifferentfromtheairwebreathetoday.Earth’sfirstatmosph
InlikemannerwecannotreferthewholephenomenaoftheRenaissancetoanyonecauseorcircumstance,orlimitthemwithinthe
A、TheUSplanofdeployingamissiledefenseshieldinCentralEurope.B、ThedevelopmentinAfrica.C、Tran’snuclearprogramand
宾馆还有多功能厅、会议厅、华丽宽敞的宴会厅多座,以及国际标准保龄球馆、桌球房、游艺室、舞厅、商场、美容中心、桑拿浴等设施。
A、Beabsent-mindedbecausetheycannotcarelessabouttheunpredictableresults.B、ListentothedebatebetweenEdithBrownCle
人类自有文化就有文化交流。人类文化从整体来说,是各国、各国民族文化汇聚,交流的产物。现代国际间的文化交流,更是以空前的规模、内容、形式和手段,在直接间接地进行着。当今的世界,既非丝绸之路时代,亦非马可波罗时代。从上海去东京,只需两个多小时,相当于从北京到杭
随机试题
糖化血红蛋白的临床意义是()。
男性,38岁,车祸伤及头部,当即出现右侧鼻唇沟变浅,右外耳道流出淡血性液体,右耳听力下降,CT示颅内少量积气。考虑患者出现了
板式橡胶支座极限抗压强度,部颁标准规定为()。
多向搅拌桩钻机就位必须正确,其孔位偏差不得大于(),钻杆垂直度偏差不得大于()。
下列关于专家判断法的信用风险评级方法说法错的是()。
【背景材料】生态文明贵阳国际论坛2014年年会7月11日在贵阳开幕。国务院总理李克强向论坛发来贺信。他表示,生态文明源于对发展的反思,也是对发展的提升,事关当代人的民生福祉和后代人的发展空间。中国把生态文明建设放在国家现代化建设更加突出的位置,坚持在发展
设X1,X2,…,X7是总体X~N(0,4)的简单随机样本,求P.
下列选项中,关于弹性分组环的叙述不正确的是()。
We’vehalvedthepriceofliterallythousandsofbooks,includinghundredsofbrandnewtitles.We’vealsotaken25%offaudiobo
NowWe’reTalking:HowVoiceTechnologyIsTransformingComputing[A]Likecastingamagicspell,itletspeoplecontrolthewor
最新回复
(
0
)