Tham khảo tài liệu 'objective ielts intermediate workbook part 5', ngoại ngữ, toefl - ielts - toeic phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | READING PASSAGE 3 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below. The Nature of Language language is an extraordinary institution standing in as much need of explanation as any other aspect of human life possibly more. But to explain it one has to stop taking it for granted. Virtually all of us are pretty fluent employers of language we grow up with it as we grow up with the ability to walk or run and using it seems as easy as those activities. lb see how truly remarkable language is we must as the psychologist Wolfgang Kohler put it. retreat to a psychic distance from the subject. Language is the most complex and sophisticated of our possessions. Only very recently for instance have grammarians begun to uncover the enormously complicated rules of grammar which underlie our languages and they still have a long way to go. Computers can be marvellous at dealing with mathematics and playing chess. Yet at least at present no computer is at all close to the reproduction of human verbal abilities. Computers are at best second-rate users of language while animals are not users of language at all. Talking might be seen as the defining characteristic of human beings. No doubt we are also the only creatures who laugh and have two legs and no feathers - but that is not too interesting. We may be the only creatures who use tools and who organise politically - and this is more interesting. Still amongst many peoples political organisation and the use of tools are extremely rudimentary whereas all known communities have possessed sophisticated languages. Further it is probably easier to find analogies in the animal world to tools and politics than it is to language. Many animals of course are capable of producing noises which cause their friends or enemies to respond in certain ways but these noises are so different in kind from human speech that it is at best a misleading analogy to speak of such noises being part of a language.
