专题06 阅读理解之说明文10篇-【好题汇编】备战2023-2024学年高一英语下学期期中真题分类汇编（上海专用）

专题06 阅读理解之说明文10篇 （22-23高一下·上海·期中）A generation understandably frightened by “adulting” may well welcome the linguistic (语言的) comfort food of childlike language. And once established, the habit can easily make the jump to those of us more advanced in years. After all, a kid is inside every one of us, and few people are resistant to the infectiousness of creativity. Young people are the primary drivers of language change, but even we “olds” — as the young are used to putting it — like to change things up now and then. As new slang creeps across generational divides, however, it inevitably stirs up people’s deepest linguistic anxieties. Does the new trend of kidspeak represent a dumbing-down of the English language? Just the opposite: with the rise of kidspeak, we are actually witnessing English’s enrichment. It has long been ordinary for one language to borrow from another, and even from a dialect of the same language: Black English has lent mainstream English words like diss and the “angry” meaning of salty. Kidspeak extends our word stock in exactly the same way that Old Norse, French, and Latin once did. On the internet, for example, kidspeak refers to a “smol kitty” and a “smol baby,” but not a “smol mailbox” or “smol Blu-ray player.” Smol, then, is not merely a way of spelling small, but a more specific term referring to cuteness. Just missing out on becoming Word of the Year at the American Dialect Society’s 2019 meeting was yeet, seemingly meant to imitate the sound of something being thrown into a container or through a net (and often pronounced with a celebratory gesture to that effect). One now speaks of “yeeting” an empty can into the trash, and the word has even developed an irregular past-tense form, yote. We have kidspeak to thank for introducing these new layers of playfulness into our vocabulary. English today is arguably more fertile than it’s been since Shakespeare’s time, and those worried about the novelty of kidspeak might consider that not so lo