单选题Questions 11--13 are based on the following passage.
单选题
How many languages are spoken in the world today?
【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[听力原文] 11-13 Throughout history, people have been interested in knowing how language first began, but no one knows exactly where and how this happened. However, we do know a lot about the languages of today and also the languages of earlier times. There are probably about 3,000 languages in the world today. Chinese is the language with the most speakers. English, Hindi, Urdu, Russian and Spanish are also spoken by millions of people. On the other hand, some languages have less than one hundred speakers. There are several important families of languages of Europe are in one large family called Indo-European. The original language of this family was spoken about 4,500 years ago. Many of the present day languages of Europe and India are modern forms of it. Languages are always changing. The English of today is very different from the English of 500 years ago. In time, some even die out completely. About 1,000 years ago English was a little-known relative of German spoken on one of the borders of Europe.
文中提到“There are probably about 3,000 languages in the world today”。在做听力题时,遇到有数字的地方一定要敏感一些,如觉得有必要就要做记录。
单选题
What do we learn about the Indo-European language family?