Throughout history, people have been interested in knowing how language first be

   Throughout history, people have been interested in knowing how languagefirst began, but no one knows exactly where or how this happened. However, wedo know a lot about languages, the languages of today and also the languages ofearlier times. There are probably about three thousand languages in the worldtoday. Chinese is the language with the most speakers. English, Russian andSpanish are also spoken by many millions of people. On the other hand, somelanguages in the world have less than one hundred speakers.

    Thereare several important families of languages in the world. For example, most ofthe languages of Europe are in one large family called Indo- European. Theoriginal (最初的) language of this family was spoken about 4,500 years ago. Manyof the present day languages of Europe and India are modern forms of thelanguage of 4,500 years ago.

   Languages are always changing. The English of today is very differentfrom the English of 500 years ago. In time some even die out completely. About1, 000 years ago English was a little- known relative of German spoken on oneof the borders of Europe.

    If alanguage has a large number of speakers or if it is very old, there may bedifferences in the way it is spoken in different areas. That is, the languagemay have several dialects. Chinese is a good example of dialectdifferences. Chinese has been spoken for thousands of years by many millions ofspeakers. The differences between the dialects of Chinese are so great thatspeakers of Chinese from some parts of China cannot understand speakers fromother parts.

1. The first paragraph mainly tells us that________.

A．most people in the world speak Chinese

B．there are thousands of languages in the world today

C．man has much knowledge about languages

D．some people know several languages

2. Most European and Indian languages

A．will soon die out completely

B．were once a relative of English

C．are no longer spoken

D．come from the same family

3.________seems to have changed a lot.

A．Chinese

B．English

C．Spanish

D．German

4 The word dialect in the last paragraph means________.

A．a special language spoken by Chinese

B．the sign used by the Chinese people in a special area

C．the difference between the old and today’s Chinese

D．the form of the language used in one part of the country

试题答案

答案：1C2D3B4D