B) most people don’t know how to handle the weapon
C) people’s lives will be threatened by the weapon
D) they may fall into the hands of criminals
18. By saying that the bomb also has a deterrent effect the spokesman means that it .
A) will frighten away any possible intruders
B) can show the special status of its owners
C) will threaten the safety of the owners as well
D) can kill those entering others’ houses by force
19. According to the passage, opponents of the private ownership of H-bombs are very much worried that .
A) the influence of the association is too powerful for the less privileged to overcome
B) poorly-educated Americans will find it difficult to make use of the weapon
C) the wide use of the weapon will push up living expenses tremendously
D) the cost of the weapon will put citizens on an unequal basis
20. From the tone of the passage we know that the author is .
A) doubtful about the necessity of keeping H-bombs at home for safety
B) unhappy with those who vote ;against the ownership of H-bombs
C) not serious about the private ownership of H-bombs
D) concerned about the spread of nuclear weapons
Passage Three
Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage.
Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed languages are unique—a speech of the hand. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy whether language, complete with grammar, is something that we are born with, or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering
work of one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf people.
When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.
Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American Sign Language (ASL) was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English (混杂英语). But Stokoe believed the hand talk his students used looked richer. He wondered Might deaf people actually have a genuine language And could that language be unlike any other on Earth It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as substandard. Stokoe’s idea was academic heresy (异端邪说).
It is 37 years later. Stokoe—now devoting his time to writing and editing books and journals and to producing video materials on ASL and the deaf culture—is having lunch at a café near the Gallaudet campus and explaining how he started a revolution. For decades educators fought his idea that signed languages are natural languages like English, French and Japanese. They assumed language must be based on speech, the modulation (调节) of sound. But sign language is based on the movement of hands, the modulation of space. What I said, Stokoe explains, is that language is not mouth stuff—it’s brain stuff.
21. The study of sign language is thought to be .
A) a new way to look at the learning of language
B) a challenge to traditional views on the nature of language
C) an approach to simplifying the grammatical structure of a language |
