浙江台州书生中学2016届第一次月考英语试题及答案(4)

41. The author’s attitude towards web holism is that of being______.
A. optimistic B. disapproving C. positive D. acceptable
42. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. The influence of web holism.  B. The advantage of web holism.
C. The popularity of web holism.  D. The cause of web holism.
43. What does the underlined word “obsessional” in the second paragraph most probably mean?
A. Attractive B. Professional C. Addictive D. Potential
44. We can infer from the passage that______.
A. web holism has the greatest effect on teenagers
B. students can hardly balance real and virtual life
C. people are addicted to games on the Internet
D. virtual life is more vivid and attractive anyway

B
During lectures, my students often ask which is the most difficult language to learn. It’s not easy to answer because there are many factors to take into consideration. For a person’s first language these factors are unimportant because people learn their mother tongue naturally. So the question of how hard a language is to learn is only relevant when learning a second language.
Studies have shown that native speakers of Spanish find Portuguese much easier to learn than, say, native speakers of Chinese, because Portuguese is very similar to Spanish, while Chinese is very different. So a person’s first language affects their learning of a second language. The greater the differences between a second language and the first, the harder it will be for most people to learn. Many Westerners think that Chinese is the hardest language to learn because of its writing system and pronunciation. But for Japanese speakers, who already use Chinese characters in their own language, learning writing is less difficult than for speakers of languages using the Roman alphabet.
A recent study reported that British embassy staff found that the second hardest language to learn was Japanese. More surprising was the language that they found most problematic----Hungarian. In this case the issue was not the writing system (as both English and Hungarian use a similar alphabet) but grammatical complexity. Hungarian has 35 cases (forms of a noun according to whether it is subject, object, genitive, etc.) and it was this that caused the British diplomatic personnel most difficulty. One suspects they would have even more problems with Tabassaran, a Caucasian(高加索人) language with 48 cases, if they ever had to learn it.:.]
Teachers and the circumstances in which a language is learned also play important roles, as does each learner’s motivation for learning. If people learn a language because they need to use it professionally, they often learn it faster than people studying a language that has no direct use in their day-to-day life.
Put simply, no language is easy to learn well, though languages which are related to our first language are easier. Learning a completely different writing system is a huge challenge, but that does not necessarily make a language more difficult than another. In the end, it is impossible to say that there is one language that is the most difficult language in the world.
45. According to the passage, who is likely to have the most difficulty learning a new language?
A. A Korean person learning French.        B. A Spanish person learning Portuguese.
C. A German person learning English.       D. A Chinese person learning Japanese.