题型:阅读理解 题类:模拟题 难易度:普通
广东省广州市2020届普通高中毕业班英语综合测试(二)
Depending on what language you speak, your eye perceives colours – and the world – differently than someone else.
The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don't all recognise these colours in the same way. Some people can't see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with ‘normal vision', causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.
Language affects our colour perception too. Different languages and cultural groups also categorize colours differently. Some languages like Dani, spoken in Papua New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, only have two terms, dark and light. Dark roughly translates as cool in those languages, and light as warm. So colours like black, blue, and green are glossed as cool colours, while lighter colours like white, red, orange and yellow are glossed as warm colours. Other cultural groups have no word for "colours" at all.
Remarkably, most of the world's languages have five basic colour terms. As well as dark, light, and red, these languages typically have a term for yellow, and a term that refers to both blue and green. That is, these languages do not have separate terms for "green" and "blue" but use one term to describe both colours. Also, Russian, Greek, Turkish and many other languages have two separate terms for blue – one referring exclusively to darker shades, and one referring to lighter shades.
The way we perceive colours can also change during our lifetime. Greek speakers, who have two fundamental colour terms to describe light and dark blue, are more likely to see these two colours as the same after living for long periods of time in the UK. There, these two colours are described in English by the same fundamental colour term: blue.
Different languages can influence our perceptions in all areas of life, not only colour. Scientists are now investigating how different languages changes the way we perceive everyday objects. Ultimately, this happens because learning a new language is like giving our brain the ability to interpret the world differently
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