题目内容
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 1,000 words which he can put into sentences, and at four he knows his language differs from that of his parents in style. rather than grammar.
Recent evidence suggests that an infant is born with the capacity of speaking. 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 analyze, 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, 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.
The reason some children are backward in speaking is most probably that______.
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According to the expert, which of the following is NOT the reason for this problem？
Laziness can actually be helpful. Like procrastinators some people may look lazy when they are really thinking, planning, contemplating, researching. We should all remember that great scientific discoveries occurred by chance. Newton wasn't working in the orchard when the apple hit him and he devised the theory of gravity. All of us would like to have someone "lazy" build the car or stove we buy, particularly if that "laziness" were caused by the worker's taking time to check each step of his work and to do his job right. And some- times, being "lazy"--that is, taking time off for a rest--is good for the overworked students or executives. Taking a rest can be particularly helpful to the athlete who is trying too hard or the doctor who is simply working himself overtime too many evenings at the clinic. So be careful when you're tempted to call someone lazy. That person may be thinking, resting, or planning his or her next work.
The main idea of the passage is that______.
SECTION B INTERVIEW
Directions: In this section you will hear everything ONCE ONLY. Listen carefully and then answer the questions that follow. Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions.
Now listen to the interview.
听力原文：INTERVIEWER: You're an expert on the urban problem, Mr. Cross. I wonder how you would describe the characteristics of these enormous cities which have sprung up in Asia and Latin America？
INTERVIEWEE: The first point to make is that they are different from large cities in Europe and America.
INTERVIEWER: Surely all large cities are essentially similar.
INTERVIEWEE: It's true that in all large cities there are the same problems of provision of housing and services, but the difference lies in the time factor.
INTERVIEWER: I know some of the cities we are considering are just as old and, in some cases, much older than cities in the United States, for instance.
INTERVIEWEE: Very true, but the large cities of Europe and the United States grew relatively slowly. London had u population of mom than a million at the beginning of the nineteenth century and this number grew for more than a hundred years until it reached its maximum of more than eight million. And this growth was parallel to industrial growth throughout the country. The same is true of New York, for example.
INTERVIEWER: But this in not true of Mexico city or Buenos Aires？
INTERVIEWEE: No, it is not. Throughout Latin America and in parts of Asia, cities have grown much faster than industry, or agriculture for that matter. Some of these cities have quadrupled in size in less than two decades, while industrial growth over the same period may only have reached thirty or forty percent.
INTERVIEWER: What does this mean？
INTERVIEWEE: Essentially that population growth of the employed are out of step. Much of the increase is due to immigration from the land, a movement of people in search of better conditions.
INTERVIEWER: And many fail to find jobs？
INTERVIEWEE: Most find some kind of employment but few find jobs in industry. The greater number are sub-employed, many doing casual jobs such as cleaning cars for tips.
INTERVIEWER: Why can't industry absorb them？
INTERVIEWEE: There are a number of reasons. Law educational standards and lack of training are one reason. The nature of so much modem industry is another.
INTERVIEWER: You mean the kind of jobs industry can offer？
INTERVIEWEE: Much industry today is capital intensive, not labor intensive. An automated factory or plant may produce a great deal but employ few workers.
INTERVIEWER: Are there other causes of growth in these cities？
INTERVIEWEE: Well, we must set the cities and their growth against a background of rising birthrates and falling mortality rates, and these, of course, are closely related to rising standards of public health.
INTERVIEWER: So it seems no easy solution to the problem of these gigantic cities now.
INTERVIEWEE: No.
This interview is mainly about______.
Hawking and his colleagues are working hard to try to find ______.
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