广东高考英语阅读理解专项训练.docxVIP

阅读理解 The Piraha are a primitive Amazonian tribe (部落) of hunter-gatherers who live deep in the Brazilian rainforest. The tribe has survived, their culture well-preserved, for centuries, although there are now only around 200 left. The Piraha, who communicate mainly through sounds and whistles, have fascinated scientists for years, mainly because they have almost no words for numbers. They use only three words to count one, two, and many. We know about the Piraha thanks to Professor Dan Everelt, who spent seven years with the tribe in the 70s and 80s. Everelt discovered a world without numbers, without time, without words for colors, without clauses and without a past tense. Their language, he found, was not just simple grammatically; it was limited in its range of sounds and differed between the sexes. For the men, it has just 11 speech sounds; for the women, it has only 10, the smallest number of speech sounds in the world. The language sounds more like humming than speech. The Piraha can also whistle their language, which is how men communicate when hunting. Their culture is similarly constrained. The Piraha can’t write, have little collective memory, and no concept of decorative art. In 1980 Everelt tried to teach them to count, he explained basic counting skills to an enthusiastic group fond of learning them to trade with other tribes. After eight months, not one could count to ten; even one plus one was beyond them. The experiment seemed to confirm Everelt’s theory: the tribe just couldn’t understand the concept of number. The Piraha’s inability to count is important because it seems to disprove Noam Chomsky’s influential Theory of Universal Grammar, which holds that the human mind has a natural ability for language, and that all languages share a basic rule structure, which enables children to understand abstract (抽象的) concepts such as number. One of Chomsky’s workmates has recently gone on an expedition (远征) to study the tribe. We do not yet know if the Piraha