Reading ComprehensionPassage 1Langua

Reading Comprehension

Passage 1

Languages are marvelously complex and wonderfully complicated organs of culture. They embody the quickest and the most efficient means of communicating within their respective culture. To learn a foreign language is to learn another culture. In the words of a poet and philosopher, “As many languages as one speaks, so many lives one lives.” A culture and its languages are as inseparable as brain and body; while one is a part of the other, neither can function without the other. In learning a foreign language, the best beginning is with the non-verbal linguistic elements of the language, its gestures, its body language. Eye contact is extremely important in English. Direct eye contact leads to understanding, or, as the English maxim (格言) has it, seeing eye-to-eye. We can never see eye-to-eye with a native speaker of English until we have learned to look English is spoken

3. According to this passage, gestures are ________.

A. non-verbal as well as non-linguistic

B. verbal and linguistic

C. non-verbal but nevertheless linguistic

D. verbal but nevertheless non-linguistic

4. “As many languages as one speaks, so many lives” means ________.

A. if one leans many foreign languages, one will have a better understanding of his own language

life is richer and more interesting if one knows several languages

no matter how many languages one knows, one can never know more than one’s own culture

if a person speaks only one language, he will live a very happy life

5. One of the following which is not synonymous with the others is _______.

A. signs B. gestures C. maxims D. body language