阅读理解. It's not a new phenomenon, but have you noticed how many nouns are being u
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阅读理解。
It's not a new phenomenon,
but have you noticed how many nouns are being used as verbs? We
all use them, often without noticing what we're doing.
I was arranging to meet someone for dinner last week, and I said “I’ll pencil it in my diary”, and
my friend said “You can ink it in”, meaning that it was a firm arrangement not a tentative one!
Many of these new verbs are linked to new technology. An obvious example is the word fax,
which is a shortening of facsimile originally, an exact copy of a book or document. We all got used
to sending and receiving faxes, and then soon started talking about faxing something and promising
we'd fax it immediately. So, noun
s turn into verbs in two easy stages. Then along came email, and we
were soon all emailing each other madly. How did we do without it? I can hardly imagine life without
my daily emails.
Email reminds me, of course, of my computer and its software, which has produced another couple
of new verbs. On my computer I can bookmark those pages from the World Wide Web that I think
I'll want to look at again, thus saving all the effort of remembering their addresses and calling them up
from scratch. I can do the same thing on my PC, but there I don't bookmark; I favorite-coming from
“favorite pages”, so the verb is derived from an adjective not a noun. I wasn’t really sure whether
people said this, but someone told me recently that they had favorited a site I was looking for and so
they could easily give me its address.
In the late 1980s I noticed that lots of my friends had acquired pagers, and kept saying things like
“I’ll page you as soon as I know what time we’re meeting”. They couldn't say it to me, though; I
refused to have one. So my children bought me a mobile phone, now known simply as a mobile and
I had to learn yet more new verbs. I can message someone, that is, I can leave a message (either
spoken or written)for them on their phone.Or I can text them, write a few words suggesting when
and where to meet, for example. How long will it be before I can mobile them, that is, phone them
using my mobile? I haven’t heard that verb yet, but I’m sure I will soon. Perhaps I’ll start using it myself!
1. “I’ll pencil it in my diary” in the second paragraph probably means .
A. it was a firm arrangement
B. it was an uncertain arrangement
C. the arrangement should be written as a diary
D. he prefers a pencil to a pen
2. A website address can be easily found if it has been .
A. emailed
B. messaged
C. favorited
D. texted
3. Which of the following has not been used as a verb yet?
A. message
B. page
C. email
D. mobile
4. The best title for this passage is .
A. New Verbs from Old Nouns
B. The Development of the English language
C. New Technology and New words
D. Technology and Language
试题答案
1-4 BCDA