新疆乌鲁木齐市第二十三中学2023-2024学年高一上学期1月期末英语试题

期 末 英 语 试 题 第一部分：阅读（共两节，满分50分） （一）阅读理解（共37.5分） Tourists visiting La Gomera and EI Hierro in the Canary-Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling — not a tune (曲调), but the Spanish language. The locals are communicating in Silbo, a whistled Spanish language. Whistled languages are almost developed in rough, mountainous regions or in thick forest. That’s because whistled speech carries much farther than ordinary speech or shouting. As a result, whistled speech can be understood up to 10 times as far away as ordinary shouting. That lets people communicate even when they cannot easily approach close enough to shout. On La Gomera, for example, a few traditional shepherds (牧羊人) still whistle to one another across mountain valleys that could take hours to cross. Whistled languages work because many of the key elements of speech can be produced in a whistle, says Meyer. We distinguish one speech sound from another by small differences in their sound frequency patterns. A long “e”, for example, is formed higher in the mouth than along “o”, giving it a higher sound. To language scientists, such languages are more than just a curiosity. By studying whistled languages, they hope to learn about how our brains get meaning from the complex sound patterns of speech. Whisting may even provide a chance to know one of the most dramatic jump forward in human evolution (进化); the origin of language itself. Despite their interest to both language experts and casual observers, whistled languages are disappearing rapidly all over the world, and some, such as the whistled form of the Tepehua language in Mexico, have disappeared. “Now you still find whistled speech only in places that are very, very remote, that have had less contact with modernity and less access to roads,” Meyer says. Fortunately, there is still hope. UNESCO, the UN cultural organization, has listed two whistled languages, Silbo, and a whistled Turkish, as the world’s cultural heritage.