2016年12月英语四级阅读理解练习及答案（12）

　　Questions 61-65 are based on the following passage.

　　Language is, and should be, a livingthing, constantly enriched with new words and forms of expression. Butthere isa vital distinction between good developments, which add to the language,enabling us to say things wecould not say before, and bad developments, whichsubtract from the language by rendering it less precise. Avivacious, colorfuluse of words is not to be confused with mere slovenliness. The kind ofslovenliness in whichsome professionals deliberately indulge is perhaps akin tothe cult ( 迷信. of theunfinished work, which haseroded most of the arts in our time. And the trueanswer to it is the same that art is enhanced, not hindered, bydiscipline. Youcannot carve satisfactorily in butter.

　　The corruption of written English hasbeen accompanied by an even sharper decline in the standard of spoken English. We speak very much less well than wascommon among educated Englishmen a generation or two ago.

　　The modem theatre has played a baneful (有害的) part in dimming our appreciation oflanguage. Instead ofthe immensely articulate dialogue of, for example, Shaw(who was also very insistent on good pronunciation.,audiences are now subjectedto streams of barely literate trivia, often designed, only too well, toexhibit'laek ofcommunication', and larded (夹杂. with theobscenities (下流的话. and grammatical errors of theintellectually impoverished. Emily Post once advised her readers: "Thetheatre is the best possible place to hear correctly-enunciated speech. "Alas, no more. One young actress was recently reported to be taking lessons inhow to speakbadly, so that she should fit in better.

　　But the BBC is the worst traitor. Aideryears of very successfully helping to raise the general standard ofspokenEnglish, it suddenly went into reverse. As the head of the Pronunciation Unitcoyly (含蓄地. put it, "In the1960s the BBC opened thefield to a much wider range of speakers." To hear a BBC disc jockeytalking to thelatest ape-like pop idol is a truly shocking experience of verbalsqualor. And the prospect seems to be of evenworse to come. School teachers areactively encouraged to ignore little Johnny's incoherent grammar,atrociousspelling and haphazard punctuation, because worrying about such thingsmight inhibit his creative genius.