Passage Two
Having no language, infants cannot be told what they need to learn. Yet by the age of three they will have mastered the basic structure of their native language and will be well on their way to communicative competence. Acquiring their language is a most impressive intellectual feat. Students of how children learn language generally agree that the most remarkable aspect of this feat is the rapid acquisition of grammar. Nevertheless, the ability of children to conform to grammatical rules is only slightly more wonderful than their ability to learn words. It has been reckoned that the average high school graduate in the United States has a reading vocabulary of 80,000 words, which includes idiomatic expressions and proper names of people and places. This vocabulary must have been learned over a period of 16 years. From the figures, it can be calculated that the average child learns at a rate of about 13 new words per day. Clearly a le
A. their ability
B. reading vocabulary
C. idiomatic expression
D. learning process
Passage Two
Having no language, infants cannot be told what they need to learn. Yet by the age of three they will have mastered the basic structure of their native language and will be well on their way to communicative competence. Acquiring their language is a most impressive intellectual feat. Students of how children learn language generally agree that the most remarkable aspect of this feat is the rapid acquisition of grammar. Nevertheless, the ability of children to conform to grammatical rules is only slightly more wonderful than their ability to learn words. It has been reckoned that the average high school graduate in the United States has a reading vocabulary of 80,000 words, which includes idiomatic expressions and proper names of people and places. This vocabulary must have been learned over a period of 16 years. From the figures, it can be calculated that the average child learns at a rate of about 13 new words per day. Clearly a le
A. their ability
B. reading vocabulary
C. idiomatic expression
D. learning process
Passage Two
Sioux names were a language unto themselves, laden with descriptive, allusive, or even magical meaning. A Sioux baby was named soon after birth--usually by a medicine man or a paternal relative--and the entire village participated in the occasion. The infant might be named for an animal, for a physical phenomenon such as thunder that occurred on the day of the birth, or even for a brave deed that once had been performed by the giver of the name. A woman generally kept the name she received at birth, but a man often replace his original name with a new one that celebrated a personal act of valor, recalled an encounter with an unusual animal, or perhaps was inspired by a dream. However, a man who had a distinguishing characteristic was forever known by an apposite nickname, such as Big Hand. Because Sioux names almost always were based on something objective, they could easily be rendered as pictographs-frequently with a line connecting visual representat
A. a woman
B. a man
C. a name
D. an act
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