专家解析大学英语四级考试历年阅读真题试题(十三)_大学英语阅读

专家解析大学英语四级考试历年阅读真题试题(十三)

　　D的说法似乎也对，但应该注意D的用词，nuclear weapons用的是复数形式，那么这个词组就指的是破坏力极强的军事上使用的核武器，而不是家庭用的氢弹。如果指家庭用氢弹应该这么表述：the nuclear weapon，用the特指文章已经提到的氢弹，weapon用单数。

　　Passage Three

　　Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage.

　　Sign has become a scientific hot button. Only in the past 20 years have specialists in language study realized that signed languages are uniquea speech of the hand. They offer a new way to probe how the brain generates and understands language, and throw new light on an old scientific controversy: whether language, complete with grammar, is something that we are born With, or whether it is a learned behavior. The current interest in sign language has roots in the pioneering work of one rebel teacher at Gallaudet University in Washington, D. C., the worlds only liberal arts university for deaf people.

　　When Bill Stokoe went to Gallaudet to teach English, the school enrolled him in a course in signing. But Stokoe noticed something odd: among themselves, students signed differently from his classroom teacher.

　　Stokoe had been taught a sort of gestural code, each movement of the hands representing a word in English. At the time, American Sign Language was thought to be no more than a form of pidgin English . But Stokoe believed the hand talk his students used looked richer. He wondered: Might deaf people actually: have a genuine language? And could that language be unlike any other on Earth? It was 1955, when even deaf people dismissed their signing as substandard. Stokoes idea was academic heresy .