Part II、真题解题
1993年Passage 1
Is language, like food, a basic human need without which a child at a critical period of life can be starved and damaged? Judging from the drastic experiment of Frederick Ⅱ in the thirteenth century, it may be. Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent.
All the infants died before the first year. But clearly there was more than lack of language here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is seriously affected.
Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking. Most often the reason for this is that the mother is insensitive to the signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to learn language rapidly. If these sensitive periods are neglected, the ideal time for acquiring skills passes and they might never be learned so easily again. A bird learns to sing and to fly rapidly at the right time, but the process is slow and hard once the critical stage has passed.
Experts suggest that speech stages are reached in a fixed sequence and at a constant age, but there are cases where speech has started late in a child who eventually turns out to be of high IQ. At twelve weeks a baby smiles and makes vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has a vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about l ,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four his language differs from that of his parents in style rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity to speak. What is special about man's brain, compared with that of the monkey, is the complex system which enables a child to connect the sight and feel of, say, a toy-bear with the sound pattern "toy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways.
But speech has to be induced, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child , where the mother recognizes the signals in the child' s babbling ( 咿呀学语) , grasping and smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends out only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child's non-verbal signals is essential to the growth and development of language.
31. The purpose of Frederick II's experiment was__
[A] to prove that children are born with the ability to speak
[B] to discover what language a child would speak without hearing any human speech
[C] to find out what role careful nursing would play in teaching a child to speak
[D] to prove that a child could be damaged without learning a language
[答案] B
[解题思路]
本题对应于文章第一段最后一句话"Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, he told the nurses to keep silent"（他希望能够发现孩子在没有听到任何母语的时候会说什么，因此他嘱咐护士们都保持沉默），其中"Hoping to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue"正是该实验的目的，因此正确答案为B。A和C选项在原文中都没有提到。D的内容与原文不符，原文中只是说，语言是否像人类其他必需品一样，没有它孩子们在生命的某个关键时刻就会因此"饿死"或是被毁掉。FrederickⅡ的实验与这一问题的答案或许有联系，但并不是这个实验的目的，因此D也不正确。
[题目译文]
弗雷德雷克二世的实验 。
[A] 是用来证明孩子们天生就有说话能力
[B] 是用来发现孩子们在没有听到任何人类语言时会说何种语言
[C] 是用来找出细心的照料对于教孩子说话起到怎样的作用
[D] 是用来证明孩子们如果没有学会一门语言就会严重受害
32. The reason some children are backward in speaking is most probably that__
[A] they are incapable of learning language rapidly
[B] they are exposed to too much language at once
[C] their mothers respond inadequately to their attempts to speak
[D] their mothers are not intelligent enough to help them
[答案] C
[解题思路]
本题对应于文章第三段的第一、二句话"Today no such severe lack exists as that ordered by Frederick. Nevertheless, some children are still backward in speaking"（现在已经不存在弗雷德雷克规定的那种严格的情境。但是，一些孩子在语言表达能力方面仍然会落后于其他孩子），而只有C选项符合原文的意思。A表达的意思正好与第三段的第二句话的最后部分相反，B和D选项的内容在文章中没有提到。
[题目译文]
导致一些孩子语言能力落后于其他人的最可能原因是 。
[A] 他们不能很快地学习语言
[B] 他们一下子面对着太多的语言
[C] 他们的母亲对于孩子们要说话的努力没有给与充分的反应
[D] 他们的母亲不够聪明，因此不能帮助孩子
33. What is exceptionally remarkable about a child is that
[A] he is born with the capacity to speak
[B] he has a brain more complex than an animal's
[C] he can produce his own sentences
[D] he owes his speech ability to good nursing
[答案] C
[解题思路]
根据题干内容，可以找出本题对应于文章倒数第二段的最后一句话"And even more incredible is the young brain's ability to pick out an order in language from the mixture of sound around him, to analyse, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in new ways"（更加令人难以置信的是，婴儿的大脑能够从他听到的周围各种声音中找到语言的顺序，并且对其进行分析，从而把这种语言以新的方式进行组合和重新组合），因此C选项符合这句话的意思，题干中的remarkable也正好对应于原文的incredible。A选项表述是没有错误的，只是它不符合题干的意思。关于B选项，文章第五段的第二句提到了人类的大脑比动物复杂，但是这也不是"exceptionally remarkable about a child"，因此该选项也可以排除。D的内容与文章中表达的内容有出入，原文第二段中说"without good mothering,in the first year of life especially,the capacity to survive is seriously affected"（如果没有母亲的照料，初始的生命特别在第一年的生存能力将受到巨大的影响），接着在第三段又指出，有些孩子在说话方面比较迟钝是因为其母亲对他们所发出的信号反应不敏感，以致使他们的母亲忽视了这些敏感阶段，从而使孩子获得语言技能的最佳时间飞逝而过，因此D也不是正确答案
[题目译文]
对于孩子来说尤其重要的一点是
[A] 天生具有说话能力
[B] 拥有比动物更加复杂的大脑
[C] 能够说出一些句子
[D] 其语言能力取决于是否得到细心照料
