BEST IELTS General Reading Test 37

Table of Contents

GENERAL READING TEST 37 – PASSAGE – 3

GENERAL READING TEST 37

READING PASSAGE – 3

Read the text and answer Questions 28 – 40

Languages around the world are dying off at a tremendous rate. Linguists estimate that between 20 per cent and 50 per cent of the 6000 languages now spoken are no longer being taught to children, and will become extinct in the next century. According to linguists at the AAAS, the loss of language is bad not only for linguists but for all humanity. “The world would be less beautiful and less interesting without linguistic diversity,” said Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “I challenge anyone to prove to me we are better off without linguistic diversity.”

Languages are dying as improved transport and telecommunications bring different peoples into closer contact, and speakers of minority tongues abandon them for the languages of more dominant cultures. Sometimes the switch is voluntary, but often it is forced. Earlier this century, for example, American Indian schoolchildren were punished for speaking their native tongue.

The most basic reason why linguistic diversity should be preserved is that language helps people to retain their culture. But speakers cited several other good reasons too. “As linguists we need linguistic diversity,” said Kenneth Hale of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We wouldn’t even know what questions to ask with only one language.”

Linguists are especially interested in the rules of grammar that seem common to all languages, because they provide important clues to how the mind works. As an example, Hale pointed to the distinction between singular and plural forms, such as “cat” and “cats”. Trying to figure out the deeper rule that allows this distinction, a linguist who knew only English might come up with two possible explanations. One is that built into the brain there is a basic binary distinction between “one” and “more than one”. Alternatively, there might be in-built distinctions between one subject, two, three or more. In English, it is impossible to tell which of these processes is at work. But by studying many different languages, linguists find the common factor is the binary distinction.

Hale also argued that language should be seen as “the product of human intellectual toil” rather than something that evolves unaided. For example, he studied a language called Damin, an offshoot of Lardil, an Australian Aboriginal tongue. Damin was a special language spoken only by young men in the first few years after their initiation. It was an extremely abstract, simplified form of Lardil, which could be taught to initiates in a few hours. Hale said the genius of Damin was the way it broke Lardil down into its most basic concepts. Lardil, for example, has many words for “fish” while Damin has only two – one meaning “bony fish”, and one meaning “cartilaginous fish”. This shows that for Lardil speakers, there is a fundamental distinction between the two.

In a similar vein, Lardil has about 90 words to cover pronouns such as “me” and “you” and determiners such as “this” and “that”. But in Damin, these are boiled down to two words, “niaa” and “niuu”, meaning “I” and “not-I”. “I hope you’ll realise this is a very big invention,” said Hale. “It’s not just joking around.” It is as if an expert linguist had sat down to make a basic study of the Lardil language, he said. Unfortunately, Damin is no longer spoken, and Lardil is dying out.

Questions 28 – 40

Do the following statements agree witht the information given in the text?

TRUE – if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE – if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN – if there is no information on this

28. Michael Krauss feels the world does not need so many languages.
29. American Indian schoolchildren prefer to speak that mother tongue.
30. Kenneth Hale believes we need to keep different languages to maintain different cultures.
31. The rules of grammar can help us to understand how people think.
32. Lardil is a simplified version of Damin.
33. Lardil is now used less than Damin.

Complete the summary below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer.

The (34…………………..) Kenneth Hale believes that a language develops as a result of (35……………………….. ) effort to understand the world, and is not something which simply (36 ________ ). In his work, he shows how breaking a language down to its fundamental (37……………………..) reveals how its speakers make a (38…………………………….) related things. He gives another very clear example of, what he claims to be a huge (39…………………………), by pointing to how numerous (40………………………….) in Lardil are reduced to just two words in Damin.

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