Passage Four

Questions 36 to 40 are based on the following passage.

What is the relation between the code and culture which creates it, and which it transmits to the next generation? Linguists in the anthropological tradition had tried to establish links with meanings expressed lexically: Eskimo words for ‘snow’, Arabic words for ‘camel’ and so on. Yet vocabulary only ‘reflects’ culture by courtesy of (蒙...提供) its internal organization as a whole; and the assertion that “because \'camels\' are important to the Arabs, therefore they have a lot of different words for \'them\'” is a statement as much about English as about Arabic. Presumably nothing is more important than rice to the Chinese; yet Chinese has a single word for rice and it means various other things besides. Chinese happens to be a type of language that favors general nouns.

As the essential medium for people to organize and convey their ideas, language is no longer what it seemed to be for the traditional linguists who used to think of language as simple formal codes. It is also closely related to the context, social or anthropological, in which the communication takes place. Today most linguists come to realize that language is an important component of culture. It determines not only the form in which ideas are transmitted, but also the method with which the content of the ideas are organized. In this perspective, language is also a communicative base on which members of a speech community form their ideas in a way that is readily comprehensible to other members of that community. It is also regarded as part of culture that is related to other fields of humanity (人类) studies.

But what is merely comic (滑稽的) when applied to lexics (词汇学) becomes seriously misleading when applied to grammar. As Whorf pointed 50 years ago, it is naive and dangerous to take isolated grammatical phenomena and try to relate them to features of a culture. When linguists recognized this, their response was to avoid the language/culture issue altogether, thus closing the door on an important area of research. That there is a relationship between a code and the culture that engenders (造成) it is beyond question; but it is an extremely complex and abstract one.

36. The first paragraph mainly discusses _____.

[A] the early history of human language

[B] how important words are in the cultural issue

[C] the way in which people name different things

[D] the relation between language and culture on the lexical level

37. According to the anthropologists, the importance of a meaning _____.

[A] reflect the customs

[B] is reflected by the number of words referring to it

[C] is connected with next generation

[D] reflect certain cultures

38. The author cites the only Chinese word for rice to show that _____.

[A] the Chinese people especially enjoy rice

[B] the Chinese people have a different viewpoint

[C] important foods are not always named by many words

[D] something culturally important may not be important in language

39. From the Arabic words for ‘camel’ and the Eskimo words for ‘snow’, we can infer that _____.

[A] language may reflect living conditions

[B] different languages may have the same origin

[C] people enjoy different things in different cultures

[D]language can be used to show people\'s versatility

40. Which of the following most appropriately describes the author\'s logic of writing this passage?

[A] Analyze an issue and in the end draw a conclusion.

[B] Present and analyze an opinion and then argue against it.

[C] Compare two different opinions and prove one of them is right.

[D] Present a question, analyze it and make efforts to answer it, and in the end leave the question unanswered.