Question

The Queen’s English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts had found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard Received.

   Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany’s University of Munich, wanted to discover whether accent (口音) changers recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. “As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records,” he said.

He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels (元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-class accent over the past years. “Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very small and slow changes that we don’t notice from year to year.”

“We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. “In 1952 she would have been hears saying ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. And ‘hame’ rather than ‘home’. In the 1950s she would have been ‘lorst’, but by the 1970s ‘lost’.”

The Queen’s broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each Christmas, the 10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch. (传统火鸡午餐).

The results were published (发表) in the Journal of Phonetics.

The Queen’s broadcasts were chosen for the study mainly because ______.

A.she has been Queen for many years     B. she has a less upper-class accent now

C.her speeches are familiar to many people D.her speeches have been recorded for 50 years

Which of the following is an example of a less noble accent in English?

A. “duaty”        B. “citee”          C. “hame”        D. “lorst”

We may infer from the text that the Journal of Phonetics is a magazine on _______.

A. speech sounds   B. Christmas customs   C. TV broadcasting   D. personal messages

What is the text mainly about?

A. The relationship between accents and social classes.

B. The Queen’s Christmas speeches on TV.

C. The changes in a person’s accent.

D. The recent development of the English language.

Answer 1

【小题1】D

【小题2】B

【小题3】A

【小题4】C

解析:

这是一篇杂志上的文章，Jonathan教授想知道同一个人的口音在半个世纪的前后会不会发生变化，研究人员发现Queen’s English的读音员发生了这样的变化，文章中也分析了发生变化的原因。

【小题1】第二段Jonathan教授的话中可以得出。

【小题2】此题文中不能找到全部的依据，可以排除C、D, 如果你看到过如下的文章，或是对英女王英语发音有所了解，做起来准确率就会更高。

【小题3】文章是关于语音的文章，应当是发表在与之有关的杂志上。 

【小题4】文章是针对一个人的口音在半世纪前后的变化及分析写的，所以C最恰当。