2. 职称英语
  3. Culture is the total sum of all the traditions, customs, beliefs, and ways o

Culture is the total sum of all the traditions, customs, beliefs, and ways o

游客2024-02-25  50
问题     Culture is the total sum of all the traditions, customs, beliefs, and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us.
    To the professional anthropologist(人类学者), there is no intrinsic (本质的) superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic rank among languages.
    People once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage, undeveloped forms of speech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of" backward" languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind our Western languages not in their sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflects the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to be noted: 1.  All languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2.  The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in "backward" languages, while different from ours, are often  surprisingly numerous and complicated. A Western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of remoteness (" this" and "that" ); some languages or the American Indians distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or to the person addressed, or remote from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future.
    This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the anthropologists: all cultures are to be viewed independently, and without ideas of rank or hierarchy. [br] The article states that grunt-and-groan forms of speech are found ______.
选项 A、nowhere today
B、among the Australian aborigines
C、among Eastern cultures
D、among people speaking "backward" languages
答案 A
解析 细节理解题。有的人认为落后的语言只是咕哝和呻吟，但是根据文章第三段的第二句话的后半部分：“……对‘落后’语言的研究表明一个事实，当今没有哪种语言可以符合那种描述(落后的语言只是咕哝和呻吟)”。所以本题的答案只有选项A最符合，而B、C和D文章中没有提及。
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