2. 职称英语
  3. For the most part, the thousands of languages in the world today fall into

For the most part, the thousands of languages in the world today fall into

游客2024-12-14  41
问题     For the most part, the thousands of languages in the world today fall into
one of two categories: tonal or nontonal. Two linguists believe they know
the genetic underpinnings for these differences. During a study of linguistic
and genetic data from 49 distinctive populations, the authors discovered a (1)______
struck correlation between two genes involved in brain development and (2)______
language tonality. Populations who speak nontonal languages have newer (3)______
versions of the genes, with mutations that began to appear roughly 37
thousand years before. "You can consider this as the first of the many pos- (4)______
sible studies that we could do to try to find a genetic basis for language and
language typology and the different populations that speak a language,"
says Patrick Wong, the assistant professor at Northwestern University, who (5)______
was not involved in this study. In English, the pitch which a word is spoken (6)______
convey emotion but usually does not affect its meaning. But in many (7)______
languages tone changes the meaning of words. For instance, the Chinese
word huar said in a high pitch means flower, but in a dipping pitch meaning (8)______
picture. The new research ties this difference to those two genes. The exact (9)______
functions of both genes are still open to debate, so they are known to affect (10)______
brain size during embryonic development. They presumably have something
to do with brain structure, because there are mutations of the genes that lead
to microcephaly, a condition in which a person’s brain is much smaller than
the average size for his or her age. [br] (4)
选项
答案 before — ago
解析 当需要表示相对于此时此刻而言的“……时间以前”时，要用ago；如果含义是“过去或者将来某个时刻之前”或者“另一个事件之前”，那么就用before。
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