英语专业八级考试模拟题13(3)

英语专业八级考试模拟题13(3)

文章出处：发布时间：2006-07-09

　　PART III READING COMPREHENSIONS

　　In this section there are four reading passages followed by fifteen multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your Answer Sheet.

　　TEXT A There are known to be at least a thousand completely different languages in Africa. There are 200 in Nigeria alone. English has remained the official language in most countries which were once British colonies, because except for Swahili, spoken in East Africa, most African languages are local, or tribal, if they wish to do business in Lagos or any of the other big cities, they have to speak English —— except in the north, where nearly everybody speaks Hausa. In fact, in business and politics and universities, English is the official language. Africans in ex-British colonies who go to live in the growing cities must learn English if they want to get on, and more and more country people are moving to the cities to find work. College students listen to lectures delivered in English by African as well as British lectures, and in the city bookshops there is a wide variety of books and journals published in English as well as in Swahili and Hausa. Africans, particularly in Nigeria, are producing excellent writers, whose books —— written in English —— are read throughout the English-speaking wor4ld. The following are all known internationally: Chinua Achube, novelist, and Wole Soyinka, poet and dramatist, both of Nigeria; James Ngugi, Kenyan novelist; Amos Tutuola, a great Nigerian storyteller and very readable. Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. The people of Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast and other ex-French colonies still speak French. Ever since the 18th century, when French was the lingua franca of Europe, the French have been jealous of the competition of English, which is the language of the commonwealth. At Commonwealth meetings, English is the only common language. English is valuable, too, at Pan-African meetings. In East Africa a completely different, non-European language has been the lingua franca of Africans for many centuries. This is Swahili, which is a mixture of Arabic and African languages. The word "Swahili" comes from the Arabic word "sawahili", meaning "of the coast". Swahili is used as the lingua franca of Kenya and Tanzania. The Portuguese traded on the East African coast for 200 years, but added no Portuguese words to Swahili. During the great colonial drive of the late 19th century, each European power introduced its own language as the official language of its new colonies. But even where English is not the official language, it has remained an important link between people who speak different languages. The leaders and most members of the governments speak it fluently. Swahili, which all British officials in East Africa had to learn, has some strange grammatical rules. For example, "mtu"="person", but in the plural this becomes "wa-tu"="people". All of the other words then begin with "W-/wa-". "Swahili has borrowed a number of words from English. For example, "a traffic island" has become "kiplefiti" (from "keep left"), but the plural, "traffic islands", obeys Swahili grammar. Singular words which begin with "ki" begin in the plural with "vi", so "viplefiti" is the plural of "keplefiti". English and African are the official language of South Africa. South African English has a slight African accent, but is otherwise like standard English. A few African words have found a place in the Oxford English Dictionary. "Trek" is used throughout the English-speaking world. Most of the Cape coloreds (people who are not whites or Africans) speak English. The Africans, who are known as the "Bantu" by South Africans, speak Zulu, Xhosa or one or more other African languages as well as English and/or Africans. African languages have given very few words to European languages. On the other hand, since many Africans now live in closer contact with the European style of life, they have had to find words for common objects and common verbs. For example in the Kxoe language of South West Africa, they call a watch "anmmuxo" which translated means "sun-see-on-thing", and "kuru" is used for "drive" (a car), which translated means to "press the bellows". In Kxoe there are words for one, two, three, but after that they have to use images. For example, "four" is "the finger with one licks out the pot"

　　36. From the passage we learn that Swahili is ____.

　　A) a language in East Africa

　　B) a local language in Africa

　　C) a tribal language in Africa

　　D) a language in North Africa

　　37. According to the passage, lingua franca means ____.

　　A) French language

　　B) English language

　　C) native language

　　D) common language

　　38. Which of the following is NOT correct?

　　A) English is the popular language in the African cities.