【单选题】Question 8 to 10 are based on the following news item.At the end of the news item, you will be given 10 seconds to answer each question.
Now listen to the news
According to the figures, by the end of the year as many as ______ people will speakEnglish well enough to use it for business.A.650 million
B.750 million
C.a billion
D.10 billion
网考网参考答案:B
网考网解析:
[听力原文] - Native English speakers
outnumbered LONDON - The accented English of fluent foreigners
such as Latino singer Ricky Martin or actress Juliette Binoche is usurping
British and American English as the dominant form of the language.
This week the British Government will announce that the number of people
with English as a second language has over taken the number who speak it as
their native tongue. According to the figures, by the end of the
year as many as 750 million people will speak English well enough to use it for
business, and as many as a billion people are thought to be learning English at
any given time. The British Council statistics have been seized
on by Education and Employment Secretary David Btunkett, who will tell a meeting
of business leaders on Tuesday to capitalise on their advantage as native
speakers. English-language books, films and TV shows are worth
nearly pounds sterling 5 billion (dollars 7.2bn) to the British economy, with
education materials alone worth pounds sterling 1.2bn (dollars 1.7bn). But the
rush to share Shakespeare’s tongue may see British schoolchildren lose the
motivation to learn foreign languages. Insiders say the drive to make English
the global lingua franca comes directly from Tony Blair. The so-called’blair
Initiative’ was launched in 1998 after the Prime Minister was told off by the
Mayor of Shanghai, Xu Kuangdi, for failing to promote English abroad. On his
return. Blair ordered the British Council to remedy the situation and allocated
pounds sterling 5 million (dollars 7.2m) for English- language initiatives. The
anglophile Xu, who lived as a student in London in the Eighties, said the
French, Germans and Americans were far better at promoting their culture. They
may also soon be far better at speaking English.
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