English is a language ______ in many countries.

     A. spoken            B. speaking          C. be spoken         D. to speak

English is a language ______ in many countries.

English is fast becoming the language of science around the world, but what is its future among everyday speakers? One expert points out that the percentage(比率) of native English speakers is declining(降低) while the languages of other rapidly growing regions are being spoken by increasing numbers of people. But English will continue to remain widespread and important.

However, British language scholar David Graddol says English will probably drop in dominance(主導(dǎo)) by the middle of this century to rank, after Chinese, about equally with Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu. “The number of people speaking English as a first language continues to rise, but it isn’t rising nearly as fast as the numbers of many other languages around the world, simply because the main population group has been largely in the less developed countries where languages other than English have been spoken,” he says.

In a recent article in the journal Science, Mr. Graddol noted that three languages that are not near the top of the list of the most widely spoken now might be there soon. These are Bengali, Tamil, and Malay, spoken in south and southeast Asia.

David Crystal, the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, says about 1.5 billion of the world’s six billion people speak it as a second tongue compared to the 400 million native speakers. But another expert on the English language says Mr. Graddol underestimates (低估) the future of its dominance. “All the evidence (證據(jù)) suggests that the English language snowball is rolling down a hill and is getting faster, but nobody quite knows what’s going to happen because no language has been in this position before.” he said.

51．In David Graddol’ s opinion, English will _______.

    A．remain widespread and important

    B．be more important than any other language

    C．lose its dominant position

    D．die away in the near future

52．The underlined sentence in the last paragraph implies that ______.

    A．snowballs will roll down faster than language balls

    B．the English language snowball is rolling down faster than any time in the past

    C．English language will soon drop in dominance

    D．more and more language users will choose English

53．How many experts does the passage mention who express their ideas about the future of English?

    A．2.                  B．3.           C．4.          D．5.

54．According to David Graddol, which of the following will possibly be one of the languages that will be most  widely spoken?

    A．Malay.     B．Arabic.           C．Urdu.             D．German.

55．What should be the best title for the passage?

       A．English Remaining the Dominant Position

       B．The Future of English? Who Knows?

       C．Opinions from Different Experts

       D．The English Language Snowball Rolling Down

B
To master a language one must be able to speak and understand the spoken language as well as to read and write. Lenin and his wife Krupskaya translated a long English book into Russian. But when they went to England in 1902, English people couldn’t understand a word they said and they couldn’t understand what was said to them. These days more and more foreigners are coming to China and more Chinese are going out to foreign countries to work or study. So the spoken language is becoming more and more important.
Speaking, of course, can’t go without listening. If you want to pronounce a word correctly, first you must hear it correctly. The sounds of the Chinese and English languages are not exactly the same. If you don’t listen carefully, you’ll find it difficult or even impossible to understand the native speakers.
Well, what about writing? Like speaking, it’s to cachange ideas. People generally use shorter words and shorter sentences in their writing. The important thing is to make your idea clear in you head and then to write it in clear lively language.
Chinese students read far too slowly. If you read fast, you understand better. If you read too slowly, by the time you have reached the end of a page you have forgotten what the beginning is about. When you meet with new words, don’t look them up in the dictionary. Guess the meaning from the context(上下文). You may not guess quite correctly the first time, but as new words come up again and again in different contexts, their meaning will become clearer and clearer. If you look up every word, you’ll never finish a book.
students of a foreign language need a particular knowledge, the knowledge of the life, history and geography of the people whose language they are studying. They should study these subjects in the foreign language, not only in translation. In this way one can kill two birds with one stone: learn a foreign language and get some knowledge of the foreign country at the same time.
45. How many points are there in the passage?
A. Two.              B. Three.             C. Four.             D. Five.
46. In his first point the writer told us ________.
A. how to speak English                B. how to read and write
C. why spoken english is important        D. why English people couldn’t understand Lenin
47. In the fourth paragraph the writer gave some advice on ________.
A. how to read faster             
B. how to guess the meaning of new words from the context
C. how to look up new words in the dictionary 
D. how to grasp the general meaning of a passage
48. “one can kill two birds with one stone” means ________.
A. getting some knowledge of a country while learning its language
B. getting more than what one wants
C. the stone is too big                      
D. the birds are blind enough