2. 外语
  3. The Aleuts, residing on several islands of the Aleutian Chain, the Pribilof Islands, and the Alaskan Peninsula, have possessed a

The Aleuts, residing on several islands of the Aleutian Chain, the Pribilof Islands, and the Alaskan Peninsula, have possessed a

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问题    The Aleuts, residing on several islands of the Aleutian Chain, the Pribilof Islands, and the Alaskan Peninsula, have possessed a written language since 1825, when the Russian missionary Ivan Veniaminov selected appropriate characters of the Cyrillic alphabet to represent Aleut speech sounds, recorded the main body of Aleut vocabulary, and formulated grammatical rules. The Czarist Russian conquest of the proud, independent sea hunters was so devastatingly thorough that tribal traditions, even tribal memories, were almost obliterated. The slaughter of the majority of an adult generation was sufficient to destroy the continuity of tribal knowledge, which was dependent upon oral transmission. As a consequence, the Aleuts developed a fanatical devotion to their language as their only cultural heritage.
   The Russian occupation placed a heavy linguistic burden on the Aleuts. Not only were they compelled to learn Russian to converse with their overseers and governors, but they had to learn Old Slavonic to take an active part in church services as well as to master the skill of reading and writing their own tongue. In 1867, when the United States purchased Alaska, the Aleuts were unable to break sharply with their immediate past and substitute English for any one of their three languages.
   To communicants of the Russian Orthodox Church a knowledge of Slavonic remained vital, as did Russian, the language in which 0ne conversed with the clergy. The Aleuts came to regard English education as a device to wean them from their religious faith. The introduction of compulsory English schooling caused a minor renascence of Russian culture as the Aleut parents sought to counteract the influence of the schoolroom. The harsh life of the Russian colonial rule began to appear more happy and beautiful in retrospect.
   Regulations forbidding instruction in any language other than English increased its unpopularity. The superficial alphabetical resemblance of Russian and Aleut linked the two tongues so closely that every restriction against teaching Russian was interpreted as an attempt to eradicate the Aleut tongue. From the wording of many regulations, it appears the American administrators often had not the slightest idea that the Aleuts were clandestinely reading and writing their own tongue or even had a written language of their own. To too many officials, anything in Cyrillic letters was Russian and something to be stamped out. Bitterness bred by abuses and the exploitations the Aleuts suffered from predatory American traders and adventurers kept alive the Aleut resentment against the language spoken by Americans.
   Gradually, despite the failure to emancipate the Aleuts from a sterile past by relating the Aleut and English languages more closely, the passage of years has assuaged the bitter misunderstandings and caused an orientation away from Russian toward English as their second language, but Aleut continues to be the language that molds their thought and expression.
The passage is developed primarily by______.
选项 A、testing the evidence supporting a theory
B、describing causes and effects of events
C、weighing the pros and cons of a plan
D、projecting the future consequences of a decision
答案B
解析 这是有关逻辑的题目，其答案为B。我们需要在整体上寻找文章发展的逻辑关系。作者在文中有几处提到了事件的因果关系。比如说，俄罗斯人的残暴引起了Aleut的devotion to their language以及美国人的misunderstanding导致了a renascence of Russian culture。A的内容在文章中被引用过，但是要证实作者的观点立场，却不用historic evidence去支持某种理论，所以是错的。C是错误的。尽管文中作者提及了俄美两国政策对Aleut造成的后果，但并非主要讲pros and cons。D也是错的。尽管文中也曾提及 Aleuts对于English的态度在慢慢改变，但本文不是主要探讨这种改变最终会导致的结果。
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