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  3. Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smit

Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smit

昕玥2020-05-20  198
问题 Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974—he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their staves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed.  Does it matter? Plenty of languages—among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chibcha—have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to posterity. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues—from Manchu ( spoken in China) to Hua (Botswana) and Gwich’in ( Alaska ) —are in danger of suffering a similar fate?  Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicise an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6,900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and South-East Asia.  Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realised that whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian was the key to success; citizens of China face similar pressure to focus on Mandarin, the main Chinese dialect.  Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language.  But in an age of mass communications, the threats to linguistic diversity are less draconian and more spontaneous. Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language (such as Swahili in East Africa) or a global one (such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by films and computer games.
选项 What do campaigners who lobby to preserve languages do to save endangered languages? A.Take measures to slow down languages’ vanishing rate. B.Try to make known languages’ accelerating vanishing rate. C.Try all their out to record and reconstruct the vanishing languages. D.Slow down languages’ vanishing rate and meanwhile make it known.
答案D
解析事实细节题。根据关键词campaigners who lobby to preserve languages定位至第三段。该段中提到这些人they are trying both to mitigate and publicise an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing.可知他们正试图降低语言加速消亡的速度，同时使语言加速消亡的现象为公众所知，D为正确答案。
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