西工大 阅读和完形.doc

Passage 1 To most of us, the word “speech” means a method of communication based on the use of sounds produced by the throat, tongue, lips, etc. Of course, other communicative can be substituted under given conditions; writing, for instance, and gestures may adequately replace vocal intercourse when hearing is impeded and sounds can not be received. Besides speech as we know it, and its substitutes, there exist a number of languages, which have acoustic bases but which, nevertheless, do not use vowels and consonants as the sound material of speech. For example,in La Gomera the habitants can converse by means of articulated whistles. For ordinary conversation, they use normal spoken Spanish, but whenever distance makes speech inconvenient or impossible, they resort to the Silbo, as this whistled form is called. Gomera is of vocanic origin and exeedingly mountainous and moving over such ground involves the expenditure of much time and energy. For this reason, the Silbo is of constant utility to Gomeras. A good whistler will be heard and understood five miles or more away when conditions are favorable,that is,when there is little or no wind. The point is that a whistle is practically a pure tone of unchanging quality, which, if perceived at all, will be intelligible. So the Silbo scores over shouted speech in two major respects: articulation does not suffer in any way when an effort is made to increase loudness, and sounds which in speech have a low level of audibility, as at close quarters; and it is superior to visual “codes” in that it is as rapid as spoken Spanish. 1.What do we know about speech? A.It is a method of communication based on sounds. B.It is a substitute for oral methods of communication. C.It is an inferior method of communication. D.It is the least common method of communication. 2.What does the writer mean when he says language has an acoustic base? A.It is based on gestures B.It is based on written symbol