問題詳情

46-50Opera singers and dry air don't get along. In fact, the best professional singers requirehumid settings to help them achieve the right pitch. "When your vocal cords are really dry,they're a little less elastic," says Caleb Everett, an anthropological linguist at theUniversity of Miami. As a result, singers experience tiny variations in pitch, called jitter,as well as wavering volume-- both of which contribute to rougher refrains.If the amount of moisture in the air influences musical pitch, Everett wondered, hasthat translated into the development of fewer tonal languages in arid locations? Tonallanguages, such as Mandarin Chinese and Cherokee, rely on variations in pitch todifferentiate meaning: the same syllable spoken at a higher pitch can specify a differentword if spoken at a lower pitch or in a rising or falling tone.In a survey of more than 3,700 languages, Everett and his collaborators found thatthose with complex tones do indeed occur less frequently in dry areas than they do inhumid ones, even after accounting for the clustering of related languages. For instance,more than half of the hundreds of languages spoken in tropical sub-Saharan locationsfeature complex tones, whereas none of the two dozen languages in the Sahara do.Overall only one in 30 complex tonal languages flourished in dry areas; one in threenontonal languages cropped up in those same regions.Those conclusions run counter to a traditional linguistic view that the structure oflanguage is independent of its environment, says Robert Ladd, a linguistics researcher atthe University of Edinburgh. To bolster the Miami group's findings, researchers in thefield will need to prove that tonal languages require a precise control of pitch.
46. What is the main purpose of this passage?
(A) The best opera singers require humid settings to perform.
(B) The amount of moisture in the air influences musical pitch.
(C) Humid locales foster languages with more complex tones.
(D) The structure of language is independent of its environment.

參考答案

答案：C
難度：困難0.370787
統計：A(13),B(29),C(33),D(8),E(2) #
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