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 one 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 author is primarily concerned with describing ______.
选项 A、the Aleuts’ loyalty to their language and American failure to understand it
B、Russian and United States’ treatment of Alaskan inhabitants both before and after 1867
C、how the Czarist Russian occupation of Alaska created a written language for the Aleuts
D、United States government attempts to persuade the Aleuts to use English as a second language
答案A
解析 这是一道主旨题。最佳的答案应是A。若要做这种寻找文章主旨的题目，我们就要找出相关的选择项，它的内容能将文章的主要内容都包含在内。另外，还要将与文章无关的内容分辨出来。正反两方面的辨别才能确保答案正确无误。B的内容不能成立，因为它超过了文章所讨论的范围。文章并不是在整体上去关注Alaska的居民所受到的待遇，而是其中的一个个别部落Aleuts。C与D也不能成立，它们的内容只表达了某个方面，没有完整表达文章的总体内容。
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