2. 职称英语
  3. At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a

At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a

游客2025-04-03  36
问题     At some point in your life, you have likely heard a character on TV or in a book say something along the lines of, "The thing that separates humans from the animals is..." You may have even heard such a sentiment completed in more than one way—some say it is our large brains, others our opposable thumbs, and still others claim it is our ability to use tools. While all of these attributes sound reasonable enough, none of them is truly unique to the human species. There are plenty of large mammals that have bigger brains than human beings, and we share our opposable thumbs and tool-using capabilities with several of our fellow primates. No, I would argue instead that the true thing that makes humans qualitatively different from other animals is our ability to use language.
    Though there are people who claim that various phenomena from dolphin sounds to bird songs are " language" these arguments are typically confusions in terminology at best. There is no doubt that these noises serve to communicate ideas from animal to animal, but to most linguists the idea of language involves a means of communicating that is more complex, rule-based, and extensible—able to capture complicated ideas even with a relatively limited vocabulary.
    Now, it seems reasonable to suppose that if human beings are several times more intelligent than these other creatures, our communications would be correspondingly more complex.
    However, I believe that the converse is actually the case that the appearance of great intelligence in human beings is partly a product of our natural affinity for language. Language acquisition is not merely a function of our general reasoning capabilities; it is accomplished by particular and unique regions of our brains during the first seven or so years of childhood. Anyone studying a second language knows how difficult it really is to achieve fluency in a foreign tongue using only our general cognitive abilities, after this "language acquisition device" has shut itself off.
    As much as we’d like to believe it, language is not mankind’s ingenious invention; it is our genetic birthright, and its acquisition is as instinctive and unconscious as salmon swimming upriver to spawn or geese flying south for the winter. Knowing this leads me to wonder: If other primates or dolphins could speak as we do, enabling them to share ideas and pass on their accumulated knowledge rather than learning it anew with each successive generation, would they really be so different from us? [br] The quotation marks("...")(Paragraph 4)most probably serve to______.
选项 A、express a tone of sarcasm
B、draw extra attention to a crucial phrase
C、indicate the author’s disagreement with the phrase
D、set apart an unusual bit of terminology
答案 D
解析 细节题。文章通篇都是在肯定语言作为区别人与动物的典型特征，并无讽刺和否定之意，故A和C错误。B“给予重要的短语更多强调”，英语中引号很少有此用法，引号多用于强调专业术语，因此排除。故选D。
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