35. (A) with (B) before (C) against (D) on 三、閱讀測驗：以下3篇短文，共有15個題目，為第36至50題。每題有4個選項，請根據各篇文意選出最適當的1個選項。 Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and are likely to disappear in this century. In fact, they are now falling out of use at a rate of about one every two weeks. Some endangered languages vanish in an instant, at the 第 3 頁/共 7 頁 death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television. New research has identified the five regions of the world where languages are disappearing most rapidly. The “hot spots” of imminent language extinctions are: Northern Australia, Central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, Eastern Siberia, and Southwest United States. All of the areas are occupied by aboriginal people speaking diverse languages, but in decreasing numbers. At a teleconference with reporters, K. David Harrison, an assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, said that more than half of the languages have no written form and are “vulnerable to loss and being forgotten.” When they disappear, they leave behind no dictionary, no text, no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a vanished culture. The dominance of English threatens the survival of the 54 indigenous languages of the Northwest Pacific plateau of North America, a region including British Columbia, Oregon and Washington. In Eastern Siberia, the researchers said, government policies have forced speakers of minority languages to use national and regional languages, such as Russian or Sakha. In China the authorities are trying to prohibit the Mongolia school children from studying Mongolian from the first school year. Forty Native American languages are still spoken in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Many of them were originally used by indigenous tribes while others were introduced by Eastern tribes that were forced to resettle on reservations there, mainly in Oklahoma. Several of these languages are moribund. Another measure of the threatened decline of many relatively obscure languages, Dr. Harrison said, is that speakers and writers of the 83 languages with “global” influence now account for 80 percent of the world population. Most of the thousands of other languages now face extinction at a rate that exceeds that of birds, mammals, fish or plants.
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