With the rapid progress of technology, the English language is changing fast. All the people have to face a choice: either ignore the development of the language and spend the rest of our lives wishing Shakespeare were alive, or keep pace with the Internet age, welcoming the new English which someone has once called Weblish. “you can’t avoid it for the simple reason that wherever a new language comes along, it surely impacts (影响) the language as a whole,” says Dr David Crystal, a famous language professor at the University of Wales.
However, there is great trouble with keeping up with the new English because there are so many new words and the old ones no longer mean what we thought they did. In the past if someone said they didn’t have “Windows”, you would have to suppose they lived in a cave without windows. But now, it is probably because they use a Mac, which is a computer. Spam, which once meant a not-so-good-kind of canned meat, now stands for unwanted “junk (垃圾)” email.
Spelling is changing too. Weblish loves to see nouns happily become verbs ( for example, “Please bookmark this site”), and verbs become nouns (“Send me the download”).Verbs and prepositions are regularly thrown together to become new nouns or adjectives(for example, dial-up, logon, print-out, pull-down, upload), while others are created from a simple pairing of nouns: cyberspace, ethernet, Internet, hyperlink, metatag and netspeak.
小题1: We can infer from the first paragraph that _____ .
A．English has completely become Weblish
B．some people wish Shakespeare were still alive
C．people may have different attitudes towards Weblish
D．people who know English have to learn a new language小题2: What is the main idea of the second paragraph?
A．Now English has many new words.
B．English words have changed a lot.
C．Old English words are no longer used at all.
D．People have difficulty in understanding some new words related to computers and the Internet.小题3: The best title for this passage would be “_____”.
A．Technology and English
B．Keep Up with the Latest Weblish
C．Don’t Forget English
D．The Advantage and Disadvantages of Weblish
