Can you remember the day when you spoke your first words? If you can, you are unusual. Try to think what the first months of your life were like. I’m sure you just spent most of your time eating, sleeping and crying. As you grew older, your parents spent more time playing with you and talking to you. You watched and listened. You began to know that people make some sounds to go with some things.
Then you began to cry to make sounds you heard. And step by step (逐渐地) you were able to make the right sound for one thing.
On that day you came to understand the secret of the language. The secret is that a certain sound means a certain thing. Only when a group of people use the same set of sounds of things can they understand each other, so these people have a language.
After you found the secret of language, you learnt words. Some of the words mean things, like books, chairs and shops. Some of the words mean
actions, for example, go and swim. Soon you learnt to put words together to share your idea, like “I want to go out and play with my friends.”
This is language. By the way of language, people can communicate (交流). So we say languages mean sharing.
【小题1】
can remember the day when we spoke our first words.
| A．Few of us | B．One |
| C．Most people | D．All of us |
【小题2】When you were a little baby, you
___________ .
| A．tried your best to remember all the sounds you heard |
| B．spent most of your time eating, sleeping and crying |
| C．could not hear any sounds around you |
| D．spent most of your time playing with your parents |
【小题3】The secret of language is that
___________ .
| A．one sound might be as good as another |
| B．a certain sound is for a certain thing |
| C．people can understand each other |
| D．there is a special sound for each other |
【小题4】The underlined word “actions” means
_____ in Chinese.
【小题5】Which of the following is TRUE?
| A．Language is easy to learn. |
| B．You learn language by reading at first. |
| C．You couldn’t learn language without parents. |
| D．Language means sharing. |
