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
(1)It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in Fran
(1)It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in Fran
admin
2019-05-24
31
问题
(1)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.
(2)Partly, it’s that American hegemony. Didier Benchimol, CEO of a French ecommerce 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.
(3)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.
(4)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.
(5)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 Academie Francaise, has not.
(6)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 U.S. rose to the status of the world’s preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power, English became the obvious second language to learn.
(7)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.
(8)The Net had two big impacts. One was that it was an exciting, potentially lucrative new industry that had its roots in the U.S., 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.
(9)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 me U.S. 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.
(10)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.
French lost its dominant status as an international language for _____.
选项
A、religious reasons
B、political reasons
C、economic reasons
D、military reasons
答案
C
解析
文章第6段提到,随着天主教堂、法国和德国分别在政治、经济和军事力量上的衰弱,语言间的竞争——先是拉丁语,然后是法语,再随后是短期内的德语——慢慢消退了。也就是说,拉丁语的衰落是政治原因引起的,法语的衰落是经济原因引起的,德语在短暂强势后,随德国军事力量的衰弱而衰落了。故答案是C。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/xobK777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
MosteconomiesintheUnitedStatesseemcaptivatedbythespellofthefreemarket.Consequently,nothingseemsgoodornormal
PASSAGEFOURAccordingtothepassage,whatcouldbebroughtaboutbyself-satisfiedculture?
PASSAGEONEWhatdoweknowabouttheauthor’sfamilyasWitnessesaccordingtothepassage?
Englishservesasafunctionalalternativelanguageinseveralareasofpublicactivityforthemanynationsoftheworldwhich
Englishservesasafunctionalalternativelanguageinseveralareasofpublicactivityforthemanynationsoftheworldwhich
AtthetimewhentheUnitedStatessplitofffromBritain,therewereproposalsindependenceshouldbelinguistically【S1】______
(1)AnAmericansurveyhasshownthateachyeareveryemployedpersonlosesthreetofourworkingdaysfromcoldsandalliedcomp
OnPublicSpeakingI.People’sfrequentresponsetogivingtheirfirstspeech:feel【T1】______【T1】______II.Thespeaker’ssecret
OnPublicSpeakingI.People’sfrequentresponsetogivingtheirfirstspeech:feel【T1】______【T1】______II.Thespeaker’ssecret
TypesofLanguageTestingI.Placement—sortnewstudentsinto【T1】______【T1】______—testthestudent’s【T2】______ratherthansp
随机试题
简述特级西湖龙井的品质特征。
《【南吕】一枝花·不伏老》自我夸耀的各种技艺中,与戏曲表演直接有关的是()
肺尖部的肺癌出现霍纳综合征为()
A.中央前回B.锥体外系统C.小脑D.枕叶E.颞叶癫痫的复杂部分性发作的病损在
抵押当事人设定房地产抵押关系,必须遵守国家和地方的有关法律、法规和房地产抵押的必备条件。房地产抵押可以分为以下几种情况()。
按照文明施工管理措施的要求,下列关于施工现场临设布置的表述中,正确的是()。
依法执教是国家和社会对教师提出的道德要求,其必要性在于()。
坚持科学发展观的根本着眼点是()。
犹太人有句名言:没有卖不出去的豆子。卖豆子的农民如果没卖出豆子,可以加水让它发芽,几天后就可以卖豆芽;如果豆芽卖不动,干脆让它长大些卖豆苗;如果豆苗卖不动,可以移植到花盒卖盆景;如果盆景卖不动,那么就把它移植到泥土里,几个月后,它就会长出许多豆子。要实现从
AsolidmajorityoftechnologyexpertsandstakeholdersparticipatinginthefourthfutureoftheInternetsurveyexpectthatby
最新回复
(
0
)