B
To master a language one must be able to speak and understand the spoken language as well as to read and write. Lenin and his wife Krupskaya translated a long English book into Russian. But when they went to England in 1902, English people couldn’t understand a word they said and they couldn’t understand what was said to them. These days more and more foreigners are coming to China and more Chinese are going out to foreign countries to work or study. So the spoken language is becoming more and more important.
Speaking, of course, can’t go without listening. If you want to pronounce a word correctly, first you must hear it correctly. The sounds of the Chinese and English languages are not exactly the same. If you don’t listen carefully, you’ll find it difficult or even impossible to understand the native speakers.
Well, what about writing? Like speaking, it’s to cachange ideas. People generally use shorter words and shorter sentences in their writing. The important thing is to make your idea clear in you head and then to write it in clear lively language.
Chinese students read far too slowly. If you read fast, you understand better. If you read too slowly, by the time you have reached the end of a page you have forgotten what the beginning is about. When you meet with new words, don’t look them up in the dictionary. Guess the meaning from the context(上下文). You may not guess quite correctly the first time, but as new words come up again and again in different contexts, their meaning will become clearer and clearer. If you look up every word, you’ll never finish a book.
students of a foreign language need a particular knowledge, the knowledge of the life, history and geography of the people whose language they are studying. They should study these subjects in the foreign language, not only in translation. In this way one can kill two birds with one stone: learn a foreign language and get some knowledge of the foreign country at the same time.
45. How many points are there in the passage?
A. Two. B. Three. C. Four. D. Five.
46. In his first point the writer told us ________.
A. how to speak English B. how to read and write
C. why spoken english is important D. why English people couldn’t understand Lenin
47. In the fourth paragraph the writer gave some advice on ________.
A. how to read faster
B. how to guess the meaning of new words from the context
C. how to look up new words in the dictionary
D. how to grasp the general meaning of a passage
48. “one can kill two birds with one stone” means ________.
A. getting some knowledge of a country while learning its language
B. getting more than what one wants
C. the stone is too big
D. the birds are blind enough
