题型：阅读理解 题类：常考题 难易度：普通
北京101中学2018-2019学年高二下学期英语期末考试试卷
I live in Mumbai, India, a big city, but I came from a remote Kerala village. When I was a boy, hardly anyone spoke English around me. So, at age nine, Dad sent me to Montfort, an exclusive boarding school. There, I had to speak English or be punished. My uniform was typical English public school: grey jacket，tie，and black leather shoes-so different from the clothes most people in my village wore. And our official school sport was cricket, something I'd never heard of, let alone played, before arriving.
Montfort had been built for the children of the British officials who once ruled India, but by the time I arrived in 1961, nearly all the students were from powerful Indian families. Its English traditions, however, continued.
When I returned home for the holidays still wearing my uniform, people stared at me like I was an alien. "Speak some English," they teased. Looking back, I unwittingly brought a bit of English culture to my village.
But English and too much Western influence are precisely what many traditionalists and politicians fear. They ask: Will such influences finish off our own culture?
Various leaders have tried to erase the British traditions, pulling down old British statues and replacing many British-rule city names with older native names. Some even suggest changing our weekly day of rest from the "Western" Sunday to the "Hindu" Tuesday.
Extreme responses I say. You can't change history, and it's only natural for foreign influences to affect a nation's culture. So Indian culture, as it is today, is really a mixture derived from centuries of foreign invasions.
Add to that the massive changes of the 20th century resulting from the television, jet-age travel, the Internet, etc.
Everything from clothes and language to food keeps changing, yet we remain Indian. I believe that Asian cultures are too ancient and deep-rooted to be weakened by foreign influences.
Allow me to illustrate my point. Some time ago, I took my visiting Singapore-born-and-raised cousin to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. Later, while driving home，I talked about the fine Chinese food we'd just had.
"Was that Chinese food?" my cousin exclaimed. "Oh, I didn't know." It must have tasted too Indian for him to realize it.
Meanwhile, like countless others, my village has transformed over the past decades. Many people wear modern clothes and TV brings cricket into local homes. There's even an English- language school, where you can hear kids giggling, yelling, flirting-all in English, but with an Indian accent. Just like the Chinese food you get in India.
Are these foreign influences something to worry about? I don't think so. India's Chinese food tastes pretty good to me!
试题篮
