[外语类试卷]雅思（阅读）模拟试卷48及答案与解析.doc

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1、雅思（阅读）模拟试卷 48及答案与解析 一、 Reading Module (60 minutes) 1 READING PASSAGE 3 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. SAVING LANGUAGE For the first time, linguists have put a price on language. To save a language from extinction isnt cheap-but more a

2、nd more people are arguing that the alternative is the death of communities There is nothing unusual about a single language dying. Communities have come and gone throughout history, and with them their language. But what is happening today is extraordinary, judged by the standards of the past. It i

3、s language extinction on a massive scale. According to the best estimates, there are some 6,000 languages in the world. Of these, about half are going to die out in the course of the next century: thats 3,000 languages in 1,200 months. On average, there is a language dying out somewhere in the world

4、 every two weeks or so. How do we know? In the course of the past two or three decades, linguists all over the world have been gathering comparative data. If they find a language with just a few speakers left, and nobody is bothering to pass the language on to the children, they conclude that langua

5、ge is bound to die out soon. And we have to draw the same conclusion if a language has less than 100 speakers. It is not likely to last very long. A 1999 survey shows that 97 per cent of the worlds languages are spoken by just four per cent of the people. It is too late to do anything to help many l

6、anguages, where the speakers are too few or too old, and where the community is too busy just trying to survive to care about their language. But many languages are not in such a serious position. Often, where languages are seriously endangered, there are things that can be done to give new life to

7、them. It is called revitalisation. Once a community realises that its language is in danger, it can start to introduce measures which can genuinely revitalise. The community itself must want to save its language. The culture of the community must need to have a respect for minority languages. There

8、needs to be funding, to support courses, materials, and teachers. And there need to be linguists, to get on with the basic task of putting the language down on paper. Thats the bottom line: getting the language documented-recorded, analysed, written down. People must be able to read and write if the

9、y and their language are to have a future in an increasingly computer- literate civilisation. But can we save a few thousand languages, just like that? Yes, if the will and funding were available. It is not cheap, getting linguists into the field, training local analysts, supporting the community wi

10、th language resources and teachers, compiling grammars and dictionaries, writing materials for use in schools. It takes time, lots of it,to revitalise an endangered language. Conditions vary so much that it is difficult to generalise, but a figure of 100,000 a year per language cannot be far from th

11、e truth. If we devoted that amount of effort over three years for each of 3,000 languages, we would be talking about some 900 million. There are some famous cases which illustrate what can be done. Welsh, alone among the Celtic languages, is not only stopping its steady decline towards extinction bu

12、t showing signs of real growth. Two Language Acts protect the status of Welsh now, and its presence is increasingly in evidence wherever you travel in Wales. On the other side of the world, Maori in New Zealand has been maintained by a system of socalled language nests, first introduced in 1982. The

13、se are organisations which provide children under five with a domestic setting in which they are intensively exposed to the language. The staff are all Maori speakers from the local community. The hope is that the children will keep their Maori skills alive after leaving the nests, and that as they

14、grow older they will in turn become role models to a new generation of young children. There are cases like this all over the world. And when the reviving language is associated with a degree of political autonomy, the growth can be especially striking, as shown by Faroese, spoken in the Faroe Islan

15、ds, after the islanders received a measure of autonomy from Denmark. In Switzerland, Romansch was facing a difficult situation, spoken in five very different dialects, with small and diminishing numbers, as young people left their community for work in the German-speaking cities. The solution here w

16、as the creation in the 1980s of a unified written language for all these dialects. Romansch Grischun, as it is now called, has official status in parts of Switzerland, and is being increasingly used in spoken form on radio and television. A language can be brought back from the very brink of extinct

17、ion. The Ainu language of Japan, after many years of neglect and repression, had reached a stage where there were only eight fluent speakers left, all elderly. However, new government policies brought fresh attitudes and a positive interest in survival. Several semispeakers - people who had become u

18、nwilling to speak Ainu because of the negative attitudes by Japanese speakers-were prompted to become active speakers again. There is fresh interest now and the language is more publicly available than it has been for years. If good descriptions and materials are available, even extinct languages ca

19、n be resurrected. Kaurna, from South Australia, is an example. This language had been extinct for about a century, but had been quite well documented. So, when a strong movement grew for its revival, it was possible to reconstruct it. The revised language is not the same as the original, of course.

20、It lacks the range that the original had, and much of the old vocabulary. But it can nonetheless act as a badge of present-day identity for its people. And as long as people continue to value it as a true marker of their identity, and are prepared to keep using it, it will develop new functions and

21、new vocabulary, as any other living language would do. It is too soon to predict the future of these revived languages, but in some parts of the world they are attracting precisely the range of positive attitudes and grass roots support which are the preconditions for language survival. In such unex

22、pected but heart-warming ways might we see the grand total of languages in the world minimally increased. 1 Questions 28-32 Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3? In boxes 28-32 on your answer sheet write YES if the statement agrees with the writers view

23、s NO if the statement contradicts the writers views NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 1 The rate at which languages are becoming extinct has increased. （ A） YES （ B） NO （ C） NOT GIVEN 2 Research on the subject of language extinction began in the 1990s. （ A） YES （

24、 B） NO （ C） NOT GIVEN 3 In order to survive, a language needs to be spoken by more than 100 people. （ A） YES （ B） NO （ C） NOT GIVEN 4 Certain parts of the world are more vulnerable than others to language extinction. （ A） YES （ B） NO （ C） NOT GIVEN 5 Saving language should be the major concern of an

25、y small community whose language is under threat. （ A） YES （ B） NO （ C） NOT GIVEN 6 Questions 33-35 The list below gives some of the factors that are necessary to assist the revitalisation of a language within a community. Which THREE of the factors are mentioned by the writer of the text? Write the

26、 appropriate letters A-G in boxes 33-35 on your answer sheet. A the existence of related languages B support from the indigenous population C books tracing the historical development of the language D on-the-spot help from language experts E a range of speakers of different ages F formal education p

27、rocedures G a common purpose for which the language is required 6 【 33】 7 【 34】 8 【 35】 9 Questions 36-40 Match the languages A-F with the statements below (Questions 36-40) which describe how a language was saved. Write your answers in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet. Languages： A Welsh B Maori C

28、Faroese D Romansch E Ainu F Kaurna 9 The region in which the language was spoken gained increased independence. 10 People were encouraged to view the language with less prejudice. 11 Language immersion programmes were set up for sectors of the population. 12 A merger of different varieties of the la

29、nguage took place. 13 Written samples of the language permitted its revitalisation. 14 READING PASSAGE 2 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. Fun for the Masses Americans worry that the distribution of income is increasingly unequal. Exami

30、ning leisure spending changes that picture. A Are you better off than you used to be? Even after six years of sustained economic growth, Americans worry about that question. Economists who plumb government income statistics agree that Americansincomes, as measured in inflation-adjusted dollars, have

31、 risen more slowly in the past two decades than in earlier times, and that some workers real incomes have actually fallen. They also agree that by almost any measure, income is distributed less equally than it used to be. Neither of those claims, however, sheds much light on whether living standards

32、 are rising or falling. This is because living standard is a highly amorphous concept. Measuring how much people earn is relatively easy, at least compared with measuring how well they live. B A recent paper by Dora Costa, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks at the livin

33、g-standards debate from an unusual direction. Rather than worrying about cash incomes, Ms Costa investigates Americansrecreational habits over the past century. She finds that people of all income levels have steadily increased the amount of time and money they devote to having fun. The distribution

34、 of dollar incomes may have become more skewed in recent years, but leisure is more evenly spread than ever. C Ms Costa bases her research on consumption surveys dating back as far as 1888. The industrial workers surveyed in that year spent, on average, three-quarters of their incomes on food, shelt

35、er and clothing. Less than 2% of the average familys income was spent on leisure but that average hid large disparities. The share of a familys budget that was spent on having fun rose sharply with its income: the lowest-income families in this working-class sample spent barely 1% of their budgets o

36、n recreation, while higher earners spent more than 3%. Only the latter group could afford such extravagances as theatre and concert performances, which were relatively much more expensive than they are today. D Since those days, leisure has steadily become less of a luxury. By 1991, the average hous

37、ehold needed to devote only 38% of its income to the basic necessities, and was able to spend 6% on recreation. Moreover, Ms Costa finds that the share of the family budget spent on leisure now rises much less sharply with income than it used to. At the beginning of this century a familys recreation

38、al spending tended to rise by 20% for every 10% rise in income. By 1972-73, a 10% income gain led to roughly a 15% rise in recreational spending, and the increase fell to only 13% in 1991. What this implies is that Americans of all income levels are now able to spend much more of their money on havi

39、ng fun. E One obvious cause is that real income overall has risen. If Americans in general are richer, their consumption of entertainment goods is less likely to be affected by changes in their income. But Ms Costa reckons that rising incomes are responsible for, at most, half of the changing struct

40、ure of leisure spending. Much of the rest may be due to the fact that poorer Americans have more time off than they used to. In earlier years, Iow-wage workers faced extremely long hours and enjoyed few days off. But since the 1940s, the less skilled (and lower paid) have worked ever-fewer hours, gi

41、ving them more time to enjoy leisure pursuits. F Conveniently, Americans have had an increasing number of recreational possibilities to choose from. Public investment in sports complexes, parks and golf courses has made leisure cheaper and more accessible. So too has technological innovation. Where

42、listening to music used to imply paying for concert tickets or owning a piano, the invention of the radio made music accessible to everyone and virtually free. Compact discs, videos and other paraphernalia have widened the choice even further. G At a time when many economists are pointing accusing f

43、ingers at technology for causing a widening inequality in the wages of skilled and unskilled workers, Ms Costas research gives it a much more egalitarian face. High earners have always been able to afford amusement. By lowering the price of entertainment, technology has improved the standard of livi

44、ng of those in the lower end of the income distribution. The implication of her results is that once recreation is taken into account, the differences in Americans living standards may not have widened so much after all. H These findings are not water-tight. Ms Costas results depend heavily upon wha

45、t exactly is classed as a recreational expenditure. Reading is an example. This was the most popular leisure activity for working men in 1888, accounting for one-quarter of all recreational spending. In 1991, reading took only 16% of the entertainment dollar. But the American Department of Labours e

46、xpenditure surveys do not distinguish between the purchase of a mathematics tome and that of a best-selling novel. Both are classified as recreational expenses. If more money is being spent on textbooks and professional books now than in earlier years, this could make recreationalspending appear str

47、onger than it really is. I Although Ms Costa tries to address this problem by showing that her results still hold even when tricky categories, such as books,are removed from the sample, the difficulty is not entirely eliminated. Nonetheless, her broad conclusion seems fair. Recreation is more availa

48、ble to all and less dependent on income. On this measure at least, inequality of living standards has fallen. 14 Questions 15-21 Reading Passage 2 has nine paragraphs A-I. From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph. Write the appropriate numbers (i-xi) in box

49、es 15-21 on your answer sheet. List of headings Wide differences in leisure activities according to income Possible inconsistencies in Ms Costas data More personal income and time influence leisure activities Investigating the lifestyle problem from a new angle Increased incomes fail to benefit everyone A controversial development offers cheaper leisure activities Technology heightens differences in living standards The gap between income and leisure spending closes Two factors have led