题目内容
1 It is nothing new that English use is on the rise around the world, especially in business circles. This also happens in France, the headquarters of the global battle against American cultural hegemony. If French guys are giving in to English, something really big must be going on. And something big is going on.
2 Partly, it's that American hegemony. Didier Benchimol, CEO of a French e-commerce software company, feels compelled to speak English perfectly because the Internet software business is dominated by Americans. He and other French businessmen also have to speak English because they want to get their message out to American investors, possessors of the world's deepest pockets.
3 The triumph of English in France and elsewhere in Europe, however, may rest on something more enduring. As they become entwined with each other politically and economically, Europeans need a way to talk to one another and to the rest of the world. And for a number of reasons, they've decided upon English as their common tongue.
4 So when German chemical and pharmaceutical company Hoechst merged with French competitor Rhone-Poulenc last year, the companies chose the vaguely Latinate Aventis as the new company name — and settled on English as the company's common language. When monetary policymakers from around Europe began meeting at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt last year to set interest rates for the new Euroland, they held their deliberations in English. Even the European Commission, with 11 official languages and a traditionally French-speaking bureaucracy, effectively switched over to English as its working language last year.
5 How did this happen？ One school attributes English's great success to the sheer weight of its merit. It's a Germanic language, brought to Britain around the fifth century A. D. During the four centuries of French-speaking rule that followed Norman Conquest of 1066, the language morphed into something else entirely. French words were added wholesale, and most of the complications of Germanic grammar were shed while few of the complications of French were added. The result is a limguage with a huge vocabulary and a simple grammar that can express most things more efficiently than either of its parents. What's more, English has remained ungoverned and open. to change — foreign words, coinages, and grammatical shifts — in a way that French, ruled by the purist Academie Francaise, had not.
6 So it's a swell language, especially for business. But the rise of English over the past few centuries clearly owes at least as much to history and economies as to the language's ability to economically express the concept win-win. What happened is that the competition first Latin, then French, then briefly, German — faded with the waning of the political, economic, and military fortunes of, respectively, the Catholic Church, France, and Germany. All along, English was increasing in importance: Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and London the world's most important financial centre, which made English a key language for business. England's colonies around the world also made it the language with the most global reach. And as that former colony the U.S. rose to the status of the world's preeminent political, economic, military, and cultural power, English became the obvious second language to learn.
7 In the 1990s more and more Europeans found themselves forced to use English. The last generation of business and government leaders who hadn't studied English in school was leaving the stage. The European Community was adding new members and evolving from a paper-shuffling club into a serious regional government that would need a single common language if it were ever to get anything done. Meanwhile, economic barriers between European nations have been disappearing,
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By saying "we're going to look the other way in terms of what our laws are,"(Lines 2-3, Paragraph 4), Mayor Anderson means ______.
A．The man has never seen the woman before.B．The two speakers work for the same company
听力原文： One winter day in 1891, a class at the training school in Massachusetts, USA, went into the gym for their daily exercises. Since the football season had ended, most of the young man felt they were in for a boring time. But their teacher James Nasmyth had other ideas. He had been working for a long time on a new game that would have the excitement of American football. Nasmyth showed the men a basket he had hung at each end of the gym and explained that they were going to use around European football At first, everybody try to throw ball into the basket no matter where he was standing .Pass ! Pass! Nasmyth kept shouting, blowing his whistle to stop the excited players. Slowly, they began to understand what was wanted of them. The problem with the new game, which was soon called basketball, was getting the ball out of the basket. They used ordinary fruit baskets with bottoms, and the ball, of course, stayed inside. At first, someone had to clime up every time a basket was scored. It was several years before someone came up with the idea of removing the bottom of the basket and letting the ball fall through. There have been many changes in the rules since then and basketball has become one of the world's most popular sports.
(30)
On Dec. 11, 2001, as part of the effort to increase homeland security, federal and local authorities in 14 states staged "Operation Safe Travel"--raids on airports to arrest employees with false identification (身份证明). In Salt Lake City there were 69 arrests. But those captured were anything but terrorists, most of them illegal immigrants from Central or South America. Authorities said the undocumented workers' illegal status made them open to blackmail(讹诈) by terrorists.
Many immigrants in Salt Lake City were angered by the arrests and said they felt as if they were being treated like disposable goods.
Mayor Anderson said those feelings were justified to a certain extent. "We're saying we want you to work in these places, we're going to look the other way in terms of what our laws are, and then when it's convenient for us, or when we can try to make a point in terms of national security, especially after Sept. 11, then you're disposable. There are whole families being uprooted for all of the wrong reasons," Anderson said.
If Sept. 11 had never happened, the airport workers would not have been arrested and could have gone on quietly living in America, probably indefinitely. And Castro, a manager at a Ben & Jerry's ice cream shop at the airport, had been working 10 years with the same false Social Security card when she was arrested in the December airport raid. Now she and her family are living under the threat of deportation(驱逐出境). Castro's case is currently waiting to be settled. While she awaits the outcome, the government has granted her permission to work here and she has returned to her job at Ben & Jerry's.
According to the author, the United States claimed to be a nation ______.
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