题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
宁夏育才中学2017-2018学年高一下学期英语期末考试试卷
Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford. At that time, few people went to college, but Noah loved to learn so his parents let him go to Yale, Connecticut's only college. He left for New Haven in 1774. Noah's years at Yale were the years of the Revolutionary War.
Sometimes 70 children of all ages were in one-room schoolhouses with no desks, poor books, and untrained teachers. Noah did not like that. Their books came from England. Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, Noah wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.
For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read.
When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English. Noah used American spellings like “color” instead of the English “colour”, “music” instead of “musick” and “center” instead of “centre”. He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like “skunk” and “squash”. It took him over 27 years to write his book. When finished in 1828, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it.
Noah did many things in his life. He worked for copyright laws, wrote textbooks, Americanized the English language, and edited (编辑) magazines. When Noah Webster died in 1843, he was regarded an American hero.
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