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Passage One In the thirteenth century, in order to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, Frederic Ⅱ told the nurses to keep silent, and all the infants died before the first year. But dearly there was more than language deprivation here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is serious affected. Today no such ruthless deprivation 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 cues and signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to mop up language rapidly. There are critical times, it seems, when children learn more readily. 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. Linguists suggest that speech milestones 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, (Intelligence Quotient). At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 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 teddy-bear (玩具熊) with the sound pattern "teddy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the hubbub of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in novel ways. But speech has to be triggered, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the cues and signals in the child’s babbling, dinging, grasping, crying, smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends of only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal cues is essential to the growth and development of language. The reason some children are backward in speaking today is that ______.

A. they do not listen carefully to their mothers
B. their mothers are not intelligent enough to help them
C. their brains have to absorb too much language at once
D. their mothers do not respond to their attempts to speak

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Passage Two The post-war explosion in the use of detergents (清结剂) was a prime cause for the deteriorating (恶化) condition of Thames twenty-five years ago. Between 1951 and 1961, detergent use increased three times. A tragic example of the results of this was when a man drowned because, though help was at hand, the would-be rescuers could not see him through the mass of foam. Previously, detergents had been of vegetable origin and caused no trouble. The new "hard" (technically, non-biodegradable 不能分解的) detergents contained elements which could not be degraded in the treatment plants sewage (污水) works. These detergents decreased the efficiency of plants by an estimated 30 percent. So when the waste water from the works was sent into the river, it still contained much "hard" detergent, which foamed or spread on the surface and greatly reduced the amount of oxygen naturally taken into the water. These detergents were also poisonous to fish. The threat became so serious that in 1957 the Standing Technical Committee on Synthetic Detergents held talks with government representatives, river authorities and manufacturers. Through friendly persuasion manufactures voluntarily agreed to phase out (逐步停止) "hard" detergents in favor of biodegradable ones which could be broken down during sewage treatment. A very marked improvement to the Thames, and some other rivers, quickly came on the heels of this application of cooperative common sense. Continuing guard is kept on the Thames: Specialists watch over the river as doctors might do for a patient. Samples are taken daily at high and low tide at twenty-nine points on a fortnightly cycle. Thus is the health of the river constantly monitored: Any minor illness is at once corrected, continuing improvement joyously recorded. The restoration of the tidal Thames is perhaps best demonstrated by the following simple table: Take the figure 900 as representing the general degree of pollution in 1950. Twenty-five years later it was 250. In 1980 it read 90 -- a reduction of pollution over thirty years by 90 percent. Justifiably we can speak of "the Thames saved". What can we infer from the tragic example given in the first paragraph

A. People rescued the man before he was drowned in the polluted water.
B. Some people were near the man who was drowning but they did not try to rescue him.
C. The man could have been saved if the Thames had not been so seriously polluted.
D. The rescuers could not see the drowned man because he was carried away by the fast flowing river water.

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Passage One In the thirteenth century, in order to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, Frederic Ⅱ told the nurses to keep silent, and all the infants died before the first year. But dearly there was more than language deprivation here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is serious affected. Today no such ruthless deprivation 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 cues and signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to mop up language rapidly. There are critical times, it seems, when children learn more readily. 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. Linguists suggest that speech milestones 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, (Intelligence Quotient). At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 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 teddy-bear (玩具熊) with the sound pattern "teddy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the hubbub of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in novel ways. But speech has to be triggered, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the cues and signals in the child’s babbling, dinging, grasping, crying, smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends of only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal cues is essential to the growth and development of language. By "critical times" (para. 2) the author means ______.

A. important stages in the child’s development
B. difficult periods in the child’s life
C. times when mothers often neglect their children
D. moments when the child becomes critical towards its mother

Passage One In the thirteenth century, in order to discover what language a child would speak if he heard no mother tongue, Frederic Ⅱ told the nurses to keep silent, and all the infants died before the first year. But dearly there was more than language deprivation here. What was missing was good mothering. Without good mothering, in the first year of life especially, the capacity to survive is serious affected. Today no such ruthless deprivation 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 cues and signals of the infant, whose brain is programmed to mop up language rapidly. There are critical times, it seems, when children learn more readily. 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. Linguists suggest that speech milestones 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, (Intelligence Quotient). At twelve weeks a baby smiles and utters vowel-like sounds; at twelve months he can speak simple words and understand simple commands; at eighteen months he has vocabulary of three to fifty words. At three he knows about 1,000 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 teddy-bear (玩具熊) with the sound pattern "teddy-bear". And even more incredible is the young brain’s ability to pick out an order in language from the hubbub of sound around him, to analyze, to combine and recombine the parts of a language in novel ways. But speech has to be triggered, and this depends on interaction between the mother and the child, where the mother recognizes the cues and signals in the child’s babbling, dinging, grasping, crying, smiling, and responds to them. Insensitivity of the mother to these signals dulls the interaction because the child gets discouraged and sends of only the obvious signals. Sensitivity to the child’s non-verbal cues is essential to the growth and development of language. Frederick Ⅱ’s experiment was "ruthless" because ______.

A. he was unkind to the nurses
B. he ignored the importance of mothering to the infant
C. he wanted to prove that children are born with the ability to speak
D. he wanted to see if the children would die before they reached the age of one

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