One truly remarkable achievement that sets us humans apart the                      【A1】________
rest of the animal kingdom is our creation and use of language.
Although animals can communicate with one another, their limited
number of calls and gestures are merely isolating signals that convey               【A2】________
very specific messages (for example, a greeting, a threat, summons to              【A3】________
congregate) in much the same way that single words or stereotyped phrases   【A4】________
do in a human language. On contrast, human languages are amazingly            【A5】________
flexible and producing. From a small number of individually                              【A6】________
meaningless sounds, a person who is proficient in a language can
generate thousands of meaningful auditory patterns (syllables, words)
that can then be combined according to a set of grammatical rules to
produce an infinite number of messages. Language is also an inventive
tool. Most of what people say or hear in any given situation is not
merely a repetition of what they have said or heard before; speakers
create novel utterances on the spot, and the topics they talk about may
have nothing to do with his current situation or the stream of ongoing            【A7】________
events. Indeed, language is the only form of communication by which
we can easily produce a variety of messages that are blatantly untrue
(as in a lie or a sarcastic utterance) and otherwise figurative in nature              【A8】________

(as in the simile“She's like a breath of fresh air"). Yet, creative as we
may be in generating new messages, but other people who know the             【A9】________
language will be able to understand any and all of our ideas as long as
each of our statements adhere to the rules and convention of the                   【A10】________
language we are speaking.

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