江苏省各市2018-2019年高三第二学期期初考试专题汇编：任务型阅读（含答案）.docVIP

江苏省2018-2019学年高三第二学期期初考试专题汇编：任务型 1、江苏省四校（南师附中、天一中学、海门中学、淮阴中学）2019届高三下学期期初调研 According to a biblical account found in The Book of Genesis, people once spoke the same language. Then, because those people banded together to build a tower in Babylon that glorified their own achievements, rather than those of their deity (神), God punished them. He ensured that mankind spoke different languages so that they would never be able to work together to dishonor God again. Was there once just a single language that all people could understand? Linguists don’t know; there’s just not enough information about the origins of language, and there are only theories about how our early ancestors formed their first words and sentences. Did early people imitate sounds they heard in the environment? Did they babble until certain sounds took on meaning? We’ll probably never know, though linguists still study baby brains to determine if language or grammar comes naturally in our heads. One prominent theory about the development of the first languages relates to tools and resources. Teaching another person how to use tools requires a certain, agreed-upon vocabulary, as does the process of sharing and protecting resources like food and shelter. Small groups of people living in close quarters would therefore need to develop a way to understand each other, so they came up with a vocabulary and syntax that meant something to them. A group of people across the world, though, would probably need an entirely different vocabulary of words, so the languages would have developed differently in isolation. So these small groups of people, living in isolation from one another, agreed on names for their tools and food, and they came up with ways to describe how resources would be divided. But when another group migrated into the area, or came with different resources to trade, the groups had to find a way to merge (融合) their different vocabularies and communicate. Over time, that’s how languages h