I am a writer. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of langu

I am a writer. I spend a great deal of mytime thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke（唤起） an emotion, a visual image,a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. AndI use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.

Born into a Chinese family that hadrecently arrived in California, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind ofEnglish my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as“broken” English. But feel embarrassed to say that. It has always bothered methat I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken”, as if it weredamaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness. I’ve heardother terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, asif everything is limited, including people’s perceptions（认识）of the limited Englishspeaker.

I know this for a fact, because when I wasgrowing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I wasashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality ofwhat she had to say. That is, because she expressed them imperfectly herthoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of evidence to support me: the factthat people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take herseriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, oreven acted as if they did not hear her.

I started writing fiction in 1985. And forreasons I won’t get into today, I began to write stories using all theEnglishes I grew up with: the English she used with me, which for lack of abetter term might be described as “broken”, and what I imagine to be hertranslation of her Chinese, her internal（内在的）language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neitheran English nor a Chinese structure: I wanted to catch what language abilitytests can never show; her intention, her feelings, the rhythms of her speechand the nature of her thoughts.

1.By saying “Language is the tool of mytrade”, the author means that ______.

2.The author used to think of her mother’sEnglish as ______.

3.Which of the following is TRUE accordingto Paragraph 3?

4.The author gradually realizes hermother’s English is ______.

5.What is the passage mainly about?

试题答案

【答案】

1.D

2.C

3.B

4.D

5.A

【解析】略