Questions 17—20 are based on the following talk about the language ability.
Is language a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged Judging from the experiment of Frederick in the thirteenth century it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent. All the infants died before the first year.
Today no such drastic deprivation exists. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant. There are critical times when children learn more readily. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again.
Linguists suggest that speech milestone is reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man’s brain is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel. And even more incredible is the young brain’s to pick out an order in language from the hubbub of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in novels.
But speech has to be triggered, and this depends on interaction between the mother and child. Insensitivity of the mother dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal cues is essential to the growth and development of language.
A. The child will make little effort to speak.
B. The child will speak properly all the same.
C. The child will stop giving out signals
D. The child will develop a language of its own.
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The world’s population keeps growing. There now are about 4 billion of us on earth. That could reach 6 billion by the end of the century and 11 billion in a further 75 years. Experts have long been concerned about such a growth. Where will we fund the food, water, jobs, houses, schools and health to care for all these people
A major new study shows that the situation may be changing. A large and rapid drop in the world’s birth rates has taken place during the past 10 years. Families generally are smaller now than they were a few years ago. It is happening in both developing and industrial nations.
Researchers said they found a number of reasons for this. More men and women are waiting longer to get married and are using birth control devices and methods to prevent or delay pregnancy. More women are going to school or working at jobs away from home instead of having children. And more governments, especially in developing nations, now support family planning programs to reduce population growth.
China is one of the nations that have achieved great progress in reducing its population growth. China has already cut its rate of population growth by about one half since 1970.
Each Chinese family is now urged to have no more than one child. And the hope is to reach a zero population growth with the total number of births equaling the total number of deaths by the year 2003.
Several nations in Europe already have fewer births than deaths. Experts said that these nations could face a serious shortage of workers in the future. And the persons who are working could face much higher taxes to help support the growing number of retired people.
A. Because more and more children will be given birth.
B. Because they will earn more money.
C. Because they will have higher living standards.
D. Because the number of retired people will become even larger.
The world’s population keeps growing. There now are about 4 billion of us on earth. That could reach 6 billion by the end of the century and 11 billion in a further 75 years. Experts have long been concerned about such a growth. Where will we fund the food, water, jobs, houses, schools and health to care for all these people
A major new study shows that the situation may be changing. A large and rapid drop in the world’s birth rates has taken place during the past 10 years. Families generally are smaller now than they were a few years ago. It is happening in both developing and industrial nations.
Researchers said they found a number of reasons for this. More men and women are waiting longer to get married and are using birth control devices and methods to prevent or delay pregnancy. More women are going to school or working at jobs away from home instead of having children. And more governments, especially in developing nations, now support family planning programs to reduce population growth.
China is one of the nations that have achieved great progress in reducing its population growth. China has already cut its rate of population growth by about one half since 1970.
Each Chinese family is now urged to have no more than one child. And the hope is to reach a zero population growth with the total number of births equaling the total number of deaths by the year 2003.
Several nations in Europe already have fewer births than deaths. Experts said that these nations could face a serious shortage of workers in the future. And the persons who are working could face much higher taxes to help support the growing number of retired people.
A. There has been a slower population growth in the past ten years.
B. The world’s rate is higher than ten years ago.
C. Families are as large as before.
D. Birth control has been carried out well all over the world.
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