Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel 【小题1】. The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing. Most people 【小题2】(raise) with whatever language learn to read and write it to a very high level of accuracy.
Admittedly, for a non-native speaker, precise mastery usually involves a great deal of confusion and frustration. Part of the problem is that English spelling looks deceptively similar to other languages that use the same alphabet but in a much 【小题3】(consistent) way.
English began its return as a written language in the 14th century. Over generations, it had crept back in among the nobility, as well as the clergy, 【小题4】 French and Latin were still the languages of educated and official pursuits.
Some spellings got entrenched this way, by 【小题5】(print) over and over again in widely distributed texts, very early on. The word ghost, which had been spelled and pronounced in Old English, took on the ‘gh’ spelling 【小题6】 the influence of Flemish-trained compositors. It was such a commonly encountered word in English text, particularly in the phrase holy ghost and other translations of Latin, 【小题7】 it just began to look more common.
Other spellings 【小题8】(arise), and were then cemented through the power exerted by the visual shape of similar words. The existence of ‘would’ and ‘should’, for example, brought about the spelling of ‘could’. There was no explicit intention 【小题9】(make) them look the same, but the frequency of their appearance nudged (推动) them toward ending up that way.
Had the Norman invasion not interrupted the literary tradition of Old English, we might have ended up with a similar situation — old English would have continued to be the basis of the writing tradition that would have later been set into type. Instead, we had 【小题10】 number of parts moving and changing independently from each other.
