单选题Directions:There are 2 passages in this section. Each
passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statement. For each of them
there are four choices marked A) , B) , C) , and D). You should decide on the
best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2
with a single line through the center. Passage One Questions 57 to 61 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 cafe 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. "
单选题
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
D. an attempt to clarify misunderstanding about the origin of
language
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】
单选题
The present growing interest in sign language was stimulated by ______.
A. a famous scholar in the study of the human brain
B. a leading specialist in the study of liberal arts
C. an English teacher in a university for the deaf
D. some senior experts in American Sign Language
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】
单选题
According to Stokoe, sign language is ______.
A. a substandard language
B. a genuine language
C. an artificial language
D. an international language
【正确答案】
B
【答案解析】
单选题
Most educators objected to Stokoe's idea because they thought ______.
A. sign language was not extensively used even by deaf people
B. sign language was too artificial to be widely accepted
C. a language should be easy to use and understand
D. a language could only exist in the form of speech sounds
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】
单选题
Stokoe's argument is based on his belief that ______.
A. sign language is as efficient as any other language