問題詳情

III. Reading Comprehension
(A)Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to reviewplays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybodyGoogles. Watch out—you’ve been verbed.The English language is in a constant state of flux. New words are formed and old onesfall into disuse. But no trend has been more obtrusive in recent years than the changing ofnouns into verbs. It is found in all areas of life, though some are more productive than others.Financiers are never lacking in ingenuity: Investec recently forecast that “Better-balancedautumn ranges should allow Marks & Spencer to anniversary tougher comparisons”—whateverthat may mean. Politics has come up with “to handbag” (a tribute to Lady Thatcher) and “todoughnut”—that is, to sit in a ring around a colleague making a parliamentary announcement.New technology is fertile ground, partly because it is constantly seeking names for thingswhich did not previously exist: we “text” from our mobiles, “bookmark” websites, “inbox” oure-mail contacts and “friend” our acquaintances on Facebook—only, in some cases, to“defriend” them later. “Blog” had scarcely arrived as a noun before it was adopted as a verb,first intransitive and then transitive. Sport is another ready source. “Rollerblade,” “skateboard,” “snowboard,” and “zorb” haveall graduated from names of equipment to actual activities. Football referees used to bookplayers, or send them off: now they “card” them.Verbing—or denominalization, as it is known to grammarians—is not new. Steven Pinker,in his book The Language Instinct (1994), points out that “easy conversion of nouns to verbshas been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make EnglishEnglish.” Elizabethan writers revelled in it: Shakespeare’s Duke of York, in Richard II (1595),says,“Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle,” and the 1552 Book of Common Prayerincludes a service “commonly called the Churching of Women.”There is a difference today, says Robert Groves, one of the editors of the new CollinsDictionary of the English Language. “Potential changes in our language are picked up andrepeated faster than they would have been in the past, when print was the only masscommunication medium, and fewer people were literate.” So coinages can be trialed around theworld—and greenlighted—as soon as they are visioned.What’s the driving force behind it? “Looking for short cuts, especially if you have to saysomething over and over again, is a common motivator,” says Groves. So fund-raisers say “togift-aid” rather than repeat “donate using gift aid” all day long, and CIA agents looking forsuspects to kidnap find “to rendition” handier than “to subject to extraordinary rendition.”Sometimes the results are ridiculous—notably when verbs are minted from nouns whichwere formed from verbs in the first place. To say “Let’s conference” instead of “Let’s confer,”“I’ll signature it” instead of “I’ll sign it,” or “they statemented” instead of “they stated,” makesthe speaker seem either ignorant or pretentious. Using an elaborate verb when there is a farsimpler alternative—such as “dialogue” for “talk”—has the same effect.Some lovers of the language deplore the whole business of verbing (Benjamin Franklincalled it “awkward and abominable” in a letter to Noah Webster, the lexicographer, in 1789);others see it as proof of a vibrant linguistic culture. Certain words seem to bring people outin a rash—among them “auctioning,” “tasking,” “impacting,” “efforting,” “accessing,”“progressing,” and “transitioning.” Often, though, the dictionary yields surprising precedents:“impact” was used as a verb in the 17th century, and “task” in the 16th. Other verbs havemanaged to escape linguistic ghettoes: “to access” was recognized by the Oxford EnglishDictionary over 20 years ago, but only as a computing term. Still others acquire new meanings:“to reference,” originally meaning “to supply with references,” has now become a near-twin of“to refer to.” Not every coinage passes into general use, and with luck “to incest” will quietly fadeaway. But as for trying to end verbing altogether, forget it. You’d simply be Canuting.
67. What is the main idea of the passage?
(A) English has a long tradition of changing nouns to verbs.
(B) Changing nouns to verbs is a popular trend in English today.
(C) Verbing is a natural process of language change and should not be resisted.
(D) English is now using nouns as verbs more often than any other languages.

參考答案

答案：B
難度：適中0.637931
統計：A(8),B(37),C(10),D(1),E(0)

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