英语文本

精听建议：

先完整地把一条新闻听一到三遍，争取掌握大意。然后，一句一句精听，力争每句话都听明白。遇到实在不懂的地方，再听写。

下面的文本材料中空缺部分里面要填的词都很简单，不过是一些值得注意的连读或者典型的美式发音哦，有些语速比较快。试试看，你能不能全部写对？

（参考文本，欢迎指出错误^^）

Lesson41 Spoken Languages

The human mouth has three major functions. Two of them -eating and breathing - are shared by members of the animal kingdom. The third function - speaking - is one of the principal 1 which distinguish human beings from the rest of living creatures.
Although primitive man must have had a spoken language, social scientists have 2 written language before the appearance of written records in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt 5-6 thousand years ago. Present-day linguists can identify over 1500 spoken languages.Chinese is the biggest language, spoken by more than a billion people. After Chinese, English is the most widely spoken first language, and has become the language of choice 3 .
English has not always been the international language. Two hundred years ago French was the dominant language.In ancient times, Arabic,Greek and Latin were international languages at different points 4 .
Many people in history tried to create a common universal language for all peoples of the world. The most successful of such effort to date was Esperanto which was spoken by about 750,000 people at one time in the mid-20th century. However, such universal languages always fail 5 because of lack of a cultural foundation.

■填空答案■

中文翻译和词汇注释

口语

人的嘴有三种主要功能。其中的两项——吃和呼吸，和动物王国的成员一样。第三项——说话，这是人类区别于其他生物的主要特征。

虽然原始人一定有口头语言，但是社会科学家没有证据证明在5到6千年前古美索不达米亚和埃及出现文字记录前人类就有文字了。如今的语言学家可以辨认1 500多种口语。中文是最大的语言，有10亿多人说中文。紧随之后的是英语，它是使用最广泛的第一语言，也已经成为了国际交流中人们选择的语言。

英语并不一直是国际语言。两百年前法语是占统治地位的语言。在古代，阿拉伯语、希腊语和拉丁语是不同时期的国际语言。

历史上有许多人试图为世界各地的民族创造一种普遍通用的语言。迄今为止，此类努力中最成功的是世界语，在20世纪中叶曾一度有大约75万人使用它，但是这样的通用语言因为缺乏文化基础，最终都以失败告终。

注释：

principal主要的
distinguish ?区分
primitive ?原始的
Mesopotamia美索不达米亚
linguist语言学家
identify ?认清，辨认
dominant占统治地位的，占优势的
universal通用的
foundation ?基础