精聽建議：

先完整地把一條新聞聽一到三遍，爭取掌握大意。然后，一句一句精聽，力爭每句話都聽明白。遇到實在不懂的地方，再聽寫。

下面的文本材料中空缺部分里面要填的詞都很簡單，不過是一些值得注意的連讀或者典型的美式發音哦，有些語速比較快。試試看，你能不能全部寫對？

（參考文本，歡迎指出錯誤^^）

Lesson41 Spoken Languages

The human mouth has three major functions. Two of them -eating and breathing - are shared by members of the animal kingdom. The third function - speaking - is one of the principal 1 which distinguish human beings from the rest of living creatures.
Although primitive man must have had a spoken language, social scientists have 2 written language before the appearance of written records in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt 5-6 thousand years ago. Present-day linguists can identify over 1500 spoken languages.Chinese is the biggest language, spoken by more than a billion people. After Chinese, English is the most widely spoken first language, and has become the language of choice 3 .
English has not always been the international language. Two hundred years ago French was the dominant language.In ancient times, Arabic,Greek and Latin were international languages at different points 4 .
Many people in history tried to create a common universal language for all peoples of the world. The most successful of such effort to date was Esperanto which was spoken by about 750,000 people at one time in the mid-20th century. However, such universal languages always fail 5 because of lack of a cultural foundation.

■填空答案■