阅读理解。
The Queen's English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen's Christmas
broadcasts had found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries
since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard
Received.
Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany's University of Munich, wanted to discover whether
accent (口音) changers recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. "As far
as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records," he said.
He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels (元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-
class accent over the past years. "Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these
are very, very small and slow changes that we don't notice from year to year."
"We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes," he told The Daily Telegraph, a British
newspaper. "In 1952 she would have been hears saying 'thet men in the bleck het'. Now it would be 'that
man in the black hat'. And 'hame' rather than 'home'. In the 1950s she would have been 'lorst', but by the
1970s 'lost'."
The Queen's broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each Christmas, the
10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional
turkey lunch. (传统火鸡午餐).
The results were published (发表) in the Journal of Phonetics.
1. The Queen's broadcasts were chosen for the study mainly because _____.
A. she has been Queen for many years
B. she has a less upper-class accent now
C. her speeches are familiar to many people
D. her speeches have been recorded for 50 years
2. Which of the following is an example of a less noble accent in English?
A. "duaty"
B. "citee"
C. "hame"
D. "lorst"
3. We may infer from the text that the Journal of Phonetics is a magazine on _____.
A. speech sounds
B. Christmas customs
C. TV broadcasting
D. personal messages
4. What is the text mainly about?
A. The relationship between accents and social classes.
B. The Queen's Christmas speeches on TV.
C. The changes in a person's accent.
D. The recent development of the English language.
