Exercise 1:: Buổi 6 - Phần Bài Tập Về Nhà
Exercise 1:: Buổi 6 - Phần Bài Tập Về Nhà
Exercise 1:: Buổi 6 - Phần Bài Tập Về Nhà
EXERCISE 1:
As many as one thousand years ago in the Southwesr, the Hopi and Zuni Indians of North America were
building with adobe- sun-baked brick plastered with mud. Their homes looked remarkably like modern
apartment houses. Some were four stories hogh and contained quarters for perhaps a thousand people,
along with storerooms for grain and other goods. These buildings were usually put up against cliffs, both
to make construction easier and for defense against enemies. They were really villages in themselves, as
later Spanish explorers must have realized since they called them ‘pueblos’, which is Spanish for towns.
The people of the pueblos raised what are called the three sisters – corn, beans and squash. They made
excellent pottery and wore marvelous baskets, some so fine that they could hold water. The Southwest
has alsways been a dry country, where water is scare. The Hopi and Zuni brought water from streams to
their fields and garden through irrigation ditches. Water was so important that it played a major role in
their religion. They developed elaborate ceremonies and religious rituals to bring rain.
The way of life if less-settle groups was simpler and more strongly influenced by nature. Small tribes
such as the Shoshone Ute wandered the dry and mountainous lands between the Rocky mountains and
the Pacific Ocean. They gathered seeds and hunted small animals such as rabbits and snakes. In the Far
North the ancestors of today’s Inuit hunted seals, walruses, and great whales. They lived right on the
frozen seas in the shelters called igloos built of blocks of packed snow. When summer came, they fished
for salmon and hunted the lordly caaribou.
The Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Sioux tribes, known as Plain Indians, lived on the grassland between the
Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. They hunted bison, commonly called buffalo. Its meat was
the chief food of these tribes, and its hide was used to make their clothing and the covering of their
tents and tipis.
4. It can be inferred from the passage that the dwellings of the Hopi and Zumi were:
A. Very small B. Highly advanced
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EXERCISE 2:
A recent e-trade advertisement shows a baby speaking directly to the camera: 'Look at this,’ he says, I'm
a free man. I go anywhere I want now.’ He describes his stock-buying activities, and then his phone
rings. This advertisement proves what comedians have known for years: few things are as funny as a
baby who talks like an adult. But it also raises an important question: Why don’t young children express
themselves clearly like adults?
Over the past half-century, scientists have settled on two reasonable possibilities. The first of these is
called the ‘mental-developmental hypothesis’. It states that one-year-olds speak in baby talk because
their immature brains can’t handle adult speech. Children don't learn to walk until their bodies are
ready.
The second is called the ‘stages-of-language hypothesis’, which states that the stages of progress in child
speech are necessary stages in language development. A basketball player can't perfect his or her jump
shot before learning to jump and shoot. Similarly, children learn to multiply after they have learned to
add. This is the order in which children are taught - not the reverse. There's evidence, for instance, that
children don't usually begin speaking in two-word sentences until they’ve learned a certain number of
single words.
The difference between these theories is this: under the mental-development hypothesis, language
learning should depend on the child’s age and level of mental development when he or she starts
learning a language. Linder the stages-of-language hypothesis, however, it shouldn’t depend on such
patterns, but only on the completion of previous stages.
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In 2007, researchers at Harvard University, who were studying the two theories, found a clever way to
test them. More than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter the US each year. Many of them no
longer hear their birth language after they arrive, and they must learn English more or less the same way
infants do - that is, by listening and by trial and error. International adoptees don’t take classes or use a
dictionary when they are learning their new tongue and most of them don’t have a well-developed first
language. All of these factors make them an ideal population in which to test these competing
hypotheses about how language is learned.
Neuroscientists Jesse Snedeker, Joy Geren and Carissa Shafto studied the language development of 27
children adopted from China between the ages of two and five years. These children began learning
English at an older age than US natives and had more mature brains with which to tackle the task.
Even so, just as with American-born infants, their first English sentences consisted of single words and
were largely bereft of function words, word endings and verbs. The adoptees then went through the
same stages as typical American- born children, albeit at a faster clip. The adoptees and native children
started combining words in sentences when their vocabulary reached the same sizes, further suggesting
that what matters is not how old you are or how mature your brain is, but the number of words you
know.
This finding - that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the toddler-talk stage -
suggests that babies speak in babytalk not because they have baby brains, but because they have only
just started learning and need time to gain enough vocabulary to be able to expand their conversations.
Before long, the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on. Learning how to chat
like an adult is a gradual process.
But this potential answer also raises an even older and more difficult question. Adult immigrants who
learn a second language rarely achieve the same proficiency in a foreign language as the average child
raised as a native speaker. Researchers have long suspected there is a ‘critical period’ for language
development, after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency. Yet we still do not understand
this critical period or know why it ends.
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children?
A. their first words
B. the way they learnt English
C. the rate at which they acquired language
D. the point at which they started producing sentences
4. What did the Harvard finding show?
A. Not all toddlers use babytalk.
B. Language learning takes place in ordered steps.
C. Some children need more conversation than others.
D. Not all brains work in the same way.
5. When the writer says ‘critical period’, he means a period when:
A. studies produce useful results.
B. adults need to be taught like children.
C. immigrants want to learn another language.
D. language learning takes place effectively.
EXERCISE 3:
In cold climates, the problem is that the head is (3)____heat all the time. As much as fifty to sixty per
cent of your body’s heat is lost through the head and neck, depending on which scientist you believe.
Clearly this heat loss needs to be prevented, but it’s important to remember that hats don’t actually (4)
____you warm, they simply stop heat escaping.
Just as important is the need to protect your neck from the effects of bright sunlight, and the brim of
your hat will do this. If you prefer a baseball cap, consider buying one that has a drop down ‘tail’ at the
back to stop your neck getting sunburnt.
And in wet weather (5)____, hats are often more practical than pooling up the hood of your waterproof
coat because when you turn your head, the hat goes with you, whereas the hood usually does not.
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