Who taught you to speak English? Your parents, while you were a young child? Your teachers at school ? Perhaps even the BBC as a grown-up. Whoever it was, somehow you have developed an understanding of what is rapidly becoming a truly global language.

    There are now about 376 million people who speak English as their first language and about the same number who have learnt it besides their mother tongue. It is said there are one billion people learning English now and about 80% of the information on the Internet is in English.

    Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Should we celebrate the fact that more and more of us can communicate, using a common language, across countries and cultures? Or should we worry about the dangers of “mono-culturalism", a world in which we all speak the same language, eat the same food and listen to the same music?

    Does it matter if an increasing number of people speak the same language? On the contrary (相反),I would have thought——although I have never accepted the argument that if only we all understood each other better, there would be fewer wars. Ask the people of India (where many of them speak at least some English) and Pakistan (the same situation with India)…

    If we all speak English, will we then all start eating McDonald's burgers? Surely not. If English becomes more dominant (占主导地位的), it will kill other languages? I doubt it. When I travel in Africa or Asia, I am always surprised by how many people can speak not only their own language but also one or more other related languages, as well as English and perhaps some French or German as well.

    When we discussed this on Talking Point a couple of years ago, we received a wonderfully poetic email from a listener in Ireland. "The English language is a beautiful language. Maybe it's like a rose," he said. "But who would ever want their garden just full of roses?"

    Well, I love roses, and I think they make a beautiful addition to any garden. But the way I see it, just by planting a few roses, you don't necessarily need to pull out everything else. If more and more people want to plant English roses, that's fine by me.

    Scotland has long been characterized as a land of romance. It contains ruins of many ancient castles and abbeys，and there is an attractive beauty in its mountains，long deep valleys，and ribbon lakes. Each year those things attract a great number of tourists.

    Numerous islands line the coast. In the north are two large groups，the Orkney Islands and the Shetland Islands. Close to the west coast are the Inner and Outer Hebrides groups，and the islands of Arran and Bute.

    The land may be divided into three regions: the Highlands in the north，the Central Lowlands and the Southern Uplands.

    The Highlands are wild and picturesque(如画的). A long valley called Glenmore crosses the Highlands from southwest to northeast.

    In the south of the Highlands are the Grampian Mountains，highest in the British Isles. Ben Nevis，the highest peak，rises to 1，243 meters. Ben Lomond rises from the shore of Loch Lomond，Scotland's largest freshwater lake.

    The Central Lowlands run from southwest to northeast and the greatest length is nearly 145 kilometers. The soil here is fertile，and there are four coalfields underlying the area. In the east is Edinburgh，Scotland's historic capital city，and in the west is Glasgow. Almost 90 percent of Scotland's population live in the Lowlands.

    In the Southern Uplands，the hills are generally less than 600 meters high. Their rounded or flat tops are often capped with dark peat(泥炭). Along the slopes are plants like grass and heather(石南花).

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    Humans' invention of zero was vital for modern mathematics and science, but we're not the only species to consider “nothing” a number. Parrots and monkeys understand the concept of zero, and now bees have joined the club, too.

    Honey bees are known to have some numerical skills such as the ability to count to four, which may come in handy when keeping track of landmarks in their environment. To see whether these abilities extended to understanding zero, researchers trained 10 bees to identify the smaller of two numbers. Across a series of trials, they showed the insects two different pictures displaying a few black shapes on a white background. If the bees flew to the picture with the smaller number of shapes, they were given delicious sugar water, but if they flew toward the larger number, they were punished with bitter-tasting food.

    Once the bees had learned to consistently make the correct choice, the researchers gave them a new choice: a white background containing no shapes at all. Even though the bees had never seen an empty picture before, 64% of the time they chose it rather than a picture containing two or three shapes, the authors report today in Science. This suggests that the insects understood that “zero” is less than two or three. And they weren't just going for the empty picture because it was new and interesting. Another group of bees trained to always choose the larger number tended to pick the nonzero image in this test.

    In further experiments, the researchers showed that bees' understanding of zero was even more complex: for example, they were able to distinguish between one and zero-a challenge even for some other members of the zero club. Advanced numerical abilities like this could give animals an evolutionary advantage, helping them keep track of predators（捕食者）and food sources. And if an insect can display such a thorough grasp of the number zero, write the researchers, then this ability may be more common in the animal kingdom than we think.

    A picture speaks a thousand words. And with over a thousand emoji pictures to represent our words, who needs to speak or write any more? According to Professor Vyv Evans of Bangor University, emoji is the UK's fastest-growing language in history. These little electronic pictures started life in Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s and are now hugely popular. They have inspired fashion, like the real-life dress copied from the dancing lady emoji, and are even recognized as art! In New York's Museum of Modern Art you can now see the first set of the 176 original emojis.

    Why do we love them so much? They allow us to personalize text and have fun as we express ourselves, make people laugh and be creative in how we use them. UK teenagers also told us they really appreciated the fact that emojis are quick and easy.

    People have their favourite emojis. In the UK, the most used emojis are ' face with tears ofjoy', ' face blowing a kiss' and 'Iove heart'. Maybe (with emojis at least) the British are more fun and romantic than people think! Companies such as McDonalds have also tried to use people's love of emojis to make advertisement. They used a series of emojis to tell a story of a disappointing day given a happy ending by a visit to McDonalds. Unluckily for McDonalds, most people added the vomiting(呕吐) emoji to the blank space after the story.

    What is the future of emoji? Is emoji developing so rapidly that it will soon compete with English as a global language? Or is technology changing so fast that emoji will soon be forgotten when the next big thing comes along? It is hard to say and even technology and language experts are divided on the subject.

    What do you think? Keep your eyes open for new developments!