Last week， I attended a research workshop on an island in the South Pacific。 Thirty people were present， and all except me came from the island called Mcclure in the nation of Vanuatu。 They live in sixteen different communities and speak sixteen distinct languages。 In many cases， you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community。 (19)Yet the residents of each village speak a completely different language。 According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Plank Institute for the science of human history， this island， just one hundred kilometers long and twenty kilometers wide， is home to speakers of perhaps forty different indigenous languages。 (20)Why so many? We could ask the same question of the entire globe。 People don‘t speak one universal language or even a handful。 Instead， today， our species collectively speaks over seven thousand distinct languages， and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet。 For example， far more languages are found in tropical regions that in the milestones。 the tropical island of new guinea is home to over nine hundred languages， Russia， twenty times larger， has 105 indigenous languages。
Even within the tropics， language diversity varies widely。 For example， the two hundred and fifty thousand people who live on Vanuatu’s eighty islands speak 110 different languages。 But in Bangladesh， a population six hundred times greater speaks only 41 languages。 How come humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out， we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates。 Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions。 They hypothesized that language diversity must be about history， cultural differences， mountains or oceans dividing populations。
But when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known， we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done， including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific。 These prior efforts all examine the degree to which different environmental， social， and geographic variables correlated with a number of languages found in a given location。 The results varied a lot from one study to another， and no clear patterns emerged。 The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges， the biggest of which centered on the old statistical saying， “Correlation does not equal causation”。
Question19。 What does the speaker say about the island of Mcclure?
Question 20。 What do we learn from the talk about languages in the world?
(缺21题)
Section A
1. C) Take a picture of him.
2. A) Gaining great fame on the Internet.
3. B) Editing his pictures and posting them online.
4. A) They are far from satisfactory.
5. A) A series of interviews with outstanding physicists
6. B) The origin of the universe.
7. D) Why there is a universe at all.
8. C) the universe formed due to a sufficient amount of matter.
Section B
9. B) she woke up speaking with a different accent.
10. A) It is usually caused by a stroke or brain injury
11. C) Russian
12. D) Books about swimming.
13. B) She published a guide to London’s best swimming spots.
14. C) They were prohibited from swimming.
15. C) She was the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
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