Unit2 Section Ⅰ Welcome to the unit & Reading（作业）-2022-2023学年新教材高中英语选择性必修第四册【精讲精练】牛津译林版

[课时作业] Ⅰ.阅读理解 A As we all know, any countries have their own languages.Even people speaking the same language have distinct dialects that are rooted in their history and culture, so whether you say “soda” or “pop” may reveal what country and what region you are from.What you call the night before Halloween may tie to your religious beliefs.What kind of slang (俚语) you use may come from the customs of the community you grew up in. Languages also show connections between us and our natural environments.Plants and animals that are given names in any language are generally those that are relevant to people speaking the language.The relevance comes from the way that the people have interacted (交互) with the animals and plants, in some cases over centuries. While we might think of languages as having a 　stereotyped　 set of words and rules that we learn in school, in fact languages are always developing.New words appear while others fall out of use and pronunciation changes over time as does the meaning of words.People also borrow words from other languages to complement(补充) their own vocabulary. Our ability to learn languages develops when we are young.Sounds heard as babies, or even in the womb(子宫), set the stage for language learning later.Baby cooing(喔啊声) is the result of babies analysis of the languages spoken to them.Babies are practicing the pronunciation and recognition of sounds that they need for communication.Children exposed to different languages early in life and growing up with various kinds of languages around them always develop better cognitive (认知的)functions, such as the ability to focus and ignore distractions(使人分心的事). Languages are as diverse as the communities that speak them and each of the about 7，000 world languages is a piece of evidence of a community's unique human experience.Yet, many languages around the world are endangered and as many as half of the world's languages could go silent by the end of this century.The reasons are that the speaker