2018年12月大学英语六级听力讲座1、2 原文及解析

Recording Two

Lastweek, I attended a research workshop on an island in the South Pacific. Thirtypeople were present, and all except me came from the island called Mcclure inthe nation of Vanuatu. Theylive in sixteen different communities and speak sixteen distinct languages. Inmany cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts ofthe next community. （19）Yet the residents of each village speak acompletely different language. According to recent work by my colleaguesat the Max Plank Institute for the science of human history, this island, justone hundred kilometers long and twenty kilometers wide, is home to speakers ofperhaps forty different indigenous languages. （20）Why so many? We could ask the samequestion of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language or evena handful. Instead, today, our species collectively speaks over seven thousanddistinct languages, and these languages are not spread randomly across theplanet. For example, far more languages are found intropical regions that in the milestones. the tropical island of new guinea ishome to over nine hundred languages, Russia, twenty times larger, has 105indigenous languages.

Evenwithin the tropics, language diversity varies widely. For example, the twohundred and fifty thousand people who live on Vanuatu’s eighty islands speak110 different languages. But in Bangladesh, a population six hundred timesgreater speaks only 41 languages. How come humans speak so many languages? Andwhy are they so unevenly spread across the planet? As it turns out, we have fewclear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguingquestions. They hypothesized that language diversity must be about history,cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations.

Butwhen our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eightdifferent countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only adozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed onlanguage diversity in the Pacific. These prior efforts all examine the degreeto which different environmental, social, and geographic variables correlatedwith a number of languages found in a given location. The results varied a lotfrom one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged. The studies also ranup against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on theold statistical saying, “Correlation does not equal causation”.

Question19. What does thespeaker say about the island of Mcclure?

Question 20. What do welearn from the talk about languages in the world?

（缺21题）

讲座2解析

本篇听好开头an island in the South Pacific，即知道内容说的和岛屿相关，当听到the island called Mcclure in the nation of Vanuatu，便需认真听后面的内容，They live in sixteen different communities and speak sixteendistinct languages. 知道本文确切内容为语言。

19题为转折后出题：the residents of eachvillage speak a completely different language。

20题符合问句后出题。答案为转折处instead之后的内容： today, our species collectively speaks over seven thousand distinctlanguages, and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.

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