Question

    Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you ever make. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21^st century. With the world’s largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world’s economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.

There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning the Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect (such as Cantonese), be sure you are studying Mandarin.

For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system--- a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic value---that is to say, we can’t tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you’ll be working with this pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn’t be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there’s always a way to overcome it.

1.Learning Chinese is becoming more and more important, because ______.

A. Chinese engines are very welcome

B. China has the world’s largest population

C. there are more and more rich people in China

D. China has become important to the world economy

2.From the text we can learn that ___________.

A. the author thinks Chinese is as difficult as English

B. the author is interested in the Chinese language and its culture

C. foreign languages can play a great role in industrial development

D. as long as the pinyin system is learned well, one can learn Chinese well

3.The last paragraph mainly tells us about ____________.

A. the difficulties of learning Chinese

B. the advantages of learning Chinese

C. the Chinese tone system

D. the Chinese writing system

4.What would be probably written following this text?

A. The sources of Chinese characters.

B. The importance of learning Chinese.

C. The advice on how to learn Chinese.

D. The difficulties of learning other languages.

Answer

1.D

2.B

3.A

4.C

【解析】

本文是一篇说明文，介绍了学习汉语的重要性、汉语的特点以及学习汉语的困难。

1.细节理解题。根据第一段中的“China stands to become the engine of the world’s economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries,”可知，中国将在未来几年成为世界经济的引擎，这使学习汉语变得非常重要，由此可知，学习汉语变得越来越重要是因为中国对世界经济变得重要，故D项正确。

2.推理判断题。根据第三段作者对汉语拼音和汉语文字体系的理解可知，作者汉语和中国文化很感兴趣，故B项正确。

3.主旨大意题。根据最后一段中的“For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn.”可知，本段主要介绍了学习汉语的困难，故A项正确。

4.推理判断题。根据最后一段中的“Yet, for a determined learner, there’s always a way to overcome it.”可知，然而，对于有决心的学习者来说，我们总有办法克服这些困难，由此可知，接下来作者可能会介绍如何克服困难学习汉语的建议，故C项正确。