2. 外语
  3. Henry Morris, an English professor, asks his college English classes to count "loan words". These are words we use that were tak

Henry Morris, an English professor, asks his college English classes to count "loan words". These are words we use that were tak

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问题     Henry Morris, an English professor, asks his college English classes to count "loan words". These are words we use that were taken directly from other languages. He jokes about the term "loan words". "It is not like we’re going to give these words back after we’ve done with them," he says. "Imported words" might be a better term. Simple sentences may contain 15 percent or less of these. Complex. sentences may be 50 percent or more "imports". Scientific papers might use mostly loan words. "We use imports constantly,: Morris says, "generally without any idea we are using them."
    Was there ever a time when people spoke just plain English7 No. Scholars estimate that one-third of the world’s languages are of Indo-European origin. These includes English, French, Latin, German, Dutch, Celtic, and Salvic tongues. Back around AD 450, when Julius Caesar was alive, English, as we know, it didn’t exist. English is relatively young. Its roots go back 1,500 years, to Britain. People there spoke Celtic. Then came Anglo-Saxon invaders. These conquerors spoke a language closely related to older forms of Dutch. Morris says Dutch words like "word", "gras" and "man", became the English equivalents "word", "grass" and "man". Anglo-Saxon "Anglish" became "English".
    But our story does not end there. English continued to grow and change. When Norman French invaded Britain in 1066, the English vocabulary got an enormous boost. Scholars say that nearly half of all English words are French in their origin. Words like art, orange, taxi, train and surprise are a few examples.
    When English colonists came to America in the 1700s, they encountered native Americans and their languages. Words like wigwam, teepee, chipmunk, possum and tomahawk settled into the colonists’ vocabulary.
    Centuries later, in the early 1900s, immigrants streamed to America’s shores. Italians taught us to say broccoli, macaroni, opera and studio. Spanish speakers added mosquito, mustang, tortilla and alligator. Bagel, kosher and pastrami came from those who spoke Yiddish. And yam, gorilla and jitterbug were taken from African languages. So if you speak English, you use words from at least 35 foreign languages.
The first paragraph is mainly about ______.
选项 A、Professor Morris and his English classes in college
B、some jokes about the term "loan words"
C、the meaning and using of "loan words" in English
D、the difference between loan words and imported words
答案C
解析 主旨大意题。第一段的关键词是loan words(贷词，即外来词) 。loan words和imported words指的是同一类词，因此D) 不正确。而“He jokes about the term‘loan words’”是指教授以开玩笑的方式来解释“贷词(外来词) ”，而不是讲关于“贷词(外来词) ”的几个笑话，因此排除B) 。A) 的内容显然与短文不符。
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