第16练 阅读理解之说明文10篇-2023年【暑假分层作业】高二英语（人教版2019）

第16练 阅读理解之说明文10篇 （2023秋·湖北·高二华中师大一附中校考期中）I am standing next to a five-year old girl in Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal (土著的) community in northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the same request of an audience of excellent professors. Many refuse; they do not know the answer. A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease that great scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a big difference in cognitive (认知的) ability. What could explain it? The surprising answer, it turns out, may be language. Around the world people communicate with one another using a variety of languages— 7,000 or so all told— and each language requires very different things from its speakers. For example, suppose I want to tell you that I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb I used would reveal whether the event happened just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in Indonesia, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had already happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb would reveal my gender. Research in my lab and in many others has been uncovering how language shapes even the most basic concept of human experience: space, time, and relationships to others. Unlike English, the language spoken in Pormpuraaw does not use relative spatial terms such as left and right. Rather speakers talk in terms of absolute directions. Of course, in English we also use direction terms but only for large spatial scales (标度). We would not say, for example, “They set the salad forks southeast of the dinner forks!” But in Pormpuraaw, absolute directions are used at all scales. This means one ends up saying things like “the cup is southeast of the plate” or “the boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother.” 1．How does the author mainly explain the role language plays in t