Table of Contents
BEST IELTS Academic Reading Test 540
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST 540 – PASSAGE – 2
IELTS ACADEMIC READING TEST – 540
READING PASSAGE – 2
A LANGUAGE THAT BECOMES EXTINCT
On a residential block at the border between Brooklyn and Queens, Gottscheer Hall appears like a mirage from 1945. Alfred Belay has been coming to Gottscheer Hall since he arrived in America more than 60 years ago. Then, the neighborhood was filled with refugees from Gottschee, those just like Belay, a settlement that once occupied the highlands of modern-day Slovenia. Now, he’s one of a few thousand remaining speakers of its language, Gottscheerisch. Every Christmas he leads a service in his 600-year-old native language that few understand.
Belay and his sister, 83-year-old Martha Hutter, have agreed to let 26-year-old Daniel Bogre Udell film them having a conversation. They walk past the dark wood bar of Gottscheer Hall serving pretzels and sausages, and they climb the stairs to an empty banquet room. Bogre Udell sets up his camera and the siblings begin to banter in their inscrutable Germanic mother tongue. Hearing such a rare language spoken on a residential block of Queens is not unusual for Bogre Udell, the co-founder of a nonprofit called Wikitongues.
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There are some 800 languages spoken within the 10-mile radius of New York City, which is more than 10 percent of the world’s estimated 7,099 languages. Since he has decided to record all of them, the melting-pot metropolis is a natural launching point.
Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. In 2014, they launched an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. They’ve already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online, and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years. “When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions,” says Bogre Udell. “Would Cervantes have written the same stories had he been forced to write in a language other than Spanish? Would the music of Beyoncé be the same in a language other than English?”
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Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century. Priceless documentation opportunities disappear regularly. Not long ago, one of the last two speakers of a Saami language dialect in the Russian steppes died right before his recording session with Wikitongues. Some 500 languages could slip through their grasp in the next five years, they estimate.
Political persecution, a lack of preservation, and globalization are to blame for the dwindling language diversity. For much of the 20th century, governments across the world have imposed language on indigenous people, often through coercion. Some 100 aboriginal languages in Australia have disappeared since European settlers arrived. A half-century after China annexed Tibet, dozens of distinct dialects with unique alphabets are on the verge of extinction. Studies have shown that suppressing language impairs everything from health to school performance.
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This forced suppression, however, is no longer the biggest threat facing our linguistic ecosystem. “Most languages die today not because of abject and outright persecution—though this does happen on occasion—but rather because they are made unviable,” says Andrade. Factors like climate change and urbanization force linguistically diverse rural and coastal communities to migrate and assimilate to new communities with new languages. “This form of language loss is a cancer, not a gunshot.”
In Gottscheer Hall, Belay and Hutter transform as they chatter for Daniel Bogre Udell’s video camera. At one point Hutter breaks into song. In Gottscheerisch, they recall growing up in a single bedroom home where they spoke Gottscheerisch—German was used for school and church. In 1941, Gottschee was annexed by the Italians and its residents were sent to resettlement camps. Four years later, the Gottscheer Relief Association opened its doors to the thousands of immigrants arriving in New York. By the time Belay and Hutter arrived, in the 1950s, the neighborhood was so full of immigrants that Hutter was barely able to practice her English.
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The newcomers spoke Gottscheerisch to each other and raised their kids with English. Now, 60 years later, Belay has started speaking to his kids in Gottscheerisch for the first time, but the language is on the brink of extinction. As a street language, Gottscheerisch was rarely written down. It could only be learned by ear until 1994, when Hutter published a five-year effort collecting definitions for 1,400 words: the first EnglishGottscheerisch dictionary. “The old Gottscheers were convinced that nobody can learn Gottscheerisch, so they didn’t try to teach it,” Hutter recalls. “But any language can be learned, so I thought, ‘This old language is going to die and they won’t know anything.’
Questions 14-19
Look at the following actions and the list of people below. Match each action with the correct person, A-D. Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 14-19 on your answer sheet NB:
YOU MAY USE ANY LETTER MORE THAN ONCE.
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14. stated that some minor language speakers believed their tongue couldn’t be taught so they refused to pass it down
15. came to the US no less than half a century ago
16. began to teach the young generation his language but this may be too late
17. stressed that the extinction of languages is not a sudden event
18. is concerned about the dire consequences of language extinction
19. prepared to be filmed in front of the camera together with her brother
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LIST OF PEOPLE
A. Martha Hutter
B. Alfred Belay
C. Frederico Andrade
D. Bogre Udell
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Questions 20-22
Choose THREE letters, A-G.
Which THREE of the following factors are mentioned in the passage as the main causes of language extinction?
A. Declining diversity in music, literature and arts
B. Globalization
C. Industrialization
D. Climate change
E. Disappearance of priceless documentation
F. Lack of humanity in contemporary society
G. Urbanization
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Questions 23-26
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
23. In what way Udell and Andrade are alike?
A. They both came from Parsons New School in New York City
B. They share similar personalities
C. They are both multi-lingual people
D. They both have recorded 1000 languages for their project
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24. Why did Bogre Udell mention Cervantes in paragraph 3?
A. To question about a solution to language disappearance
B. To stress the significance of language diversity
C. To state possible causes of language extinction
D. To compare the difference between literature and music in different languages
25. Why did the writer mention the event in Russian steppes in the fourth paragraph?
A. To illustrate the regular disappearance of minor languages
B. To estimate the undesirable consequences of language disappearance
C. To record the death of a minor group of people in Russia
D. To prove that their prediction about the disappearance of some languages were true
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26. What can be inferred from the fifth paragraph?
A. Prior to the arrival of European colonizers, a hundred of minor languages in Australia went extinct.
B. Language suppression is harmful to everything apart from health and academic performance.
C. Language needs preserving; otherwise, they will become extinct out of sudden
D. Climate change and urbanization lead to immigration, language assimilation and possibly language extinction.
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ANSWERS
14. A
15. B
16. B
17. C
18. D
19. A
20. B/D/G
21. B/D/G
22. B/D/G
23. C
24. B
25. A
26. D
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