2014-2015学年人教版高中英语选修20英语练习题.pdfVIP

语 篇 提 能 Ⅰ.阅读理解 Americans have taken over from the Indians many things besides their continent! Where did corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate and maple sugar come from? The Indians. Who invented moccasins, snowshoes and hammocks? The Indians! A list of the tools, plants, materials, and designs we owe to the Indians would include hundreds of items. But there is something far more familiar, something that is always at hand. It is used daily by every American: a large vocabulary of Indian words. Potato, tomato, chocolate, moccasin and hammock came into English from Indian languages. So did cocoa, tobacco, maize (an Indian word for corn) and succotash. Some words have changed on the way. Potato, for example, comes from a word that sounds like “batata”. Cocoa began as “cacahuatl”． Some meanings have also changed. The long Indian word from which succotash comes means “something broken off in bits.” Indian women often varied their dishes by mixing bits of one food with another. White men who ate an Indian dish of mixed lima beans (青豆) and corn began using the Indian word to mean this particular mixture. Put on your moccasins and take a walk in the country. If it is a cold day and you wear a mackinaw, your jacket will be as Indian as your shoes. But mackinaw came from “michilimackinac， ” the Indian name of a place where a fort (集市) served as a trading post. Bright­coloured blankets or jackets bought at the post soon became known as “mackinaws.” Early white visitors to the continent found Indian words useful for the things new to them. But some Indian sounds, such as the “tl” at the end of many words, were hard to say. That is why “coyotl” became coyote and “tomatl” became tomato. S