精听建议：

先完整地把一条新闻听一到三遍，争取掌握大意。然后，一句一句精听，力争每句话都听明白。遇到实在不懂的地方，再听写。

下面的文本材料中空缺部分里面要填的词都很简单，不过是一些值得注意的连读或者典型的美式发音哦，有些语速比较快。试试看，你能不能全部写对？

（参考文本，欢迎指出错误^^）

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.

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