Unit 5 Languages Around the World 能力提升素养练习-2024届高三英语一轮复习人教版（2019）必修第一册

Unit 5 Languages Around the World 能力提升素养练习 Ⅰ.阅读理解 A Eleven of the world's languages have at least 100 million native speakers. The biggest are Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi. Next come Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Japanese, French and German. Experts say these eleven languages are the mother tongues of half the world's population. But the world has close to 7,000 languages. Linguists (语言学家) predict that as many as half of these may be at risk of disappearing by the end of this century. That would mean another language dies every two weeks. Members of the Siletz Indian tribe (部落) in the northwestern state of Oregon take pride in their language. Their language, they say, “is as old as time itself”．But today very few people can speak it fluently. In fact, you can count the number of fluent speakers on one hand. More than 10,000 entries can be found in the Siletz Online Talking Dictionary. Professor Harrison has posted talking dictionaries for seven other highly endangered languages from around the world. He says technology can not only spread the influence of major languages but also help save endangered ones. Smartphone applications, YouTube videos and Facebook pages have all become digital tools for language activists and experts. Mr. Harrison and a researcher in Oregon have mapped areas of endangered languages. One is the Pacific Northwest in the United States. Others include the upper Amazon basin, Siberia and northern Australia. In Canada's far north, the Inuit people are struggling to preserve their native language, Inuktitut. Part of the effort involves Microsoft. The company is translating terms in its Windows operating system and Office software into Inuktitut. The programming group had to invent new words to include all the terms in some Windows and Word document menus. Nowadays so many people will spend their entire day sitting in front of a computer. If you're sitting in front of your computer in English all day, that just reinforce