(24-27)New Words for a Changing World
         What do people mean when they say languages are “alive”? Well, they mean that languages are alwayschanging. Take English for exmple. Every year, there are always new words, while some fall out of use. Today,many of these new words come from technology. Modern technology is changing quickly and so we need to comeup with new ways to talk about new things.
         Some new words are old ones that take on a new meaning. For example, the word “troll” means a kind ofcreature. But now we use this word to refer to a person who posts comments in Facebook groups only to makeothers angry. Other new words come from new ones but they look a little different, like “selfie,” which comes fromthe word “self.” A selfie is a photo of you that is taken by yourself. It is popular because it is convenient to usesmartphones to take pictures.
         Other new words are borrowed from other languages. For example, “emoji” comes from Japanese. InJapanese, “e” means “picture” and “moji” means “character.” Emoji are little pictures that we include inFacebook or text messages. Some popular emoji include happy faces, thumbs up, and hearts. As you can see,words are changing with time and culture, just like us. That’s why languages are as alive as we are!
* alive 有生命的 creature 生物 refer to 指稱 post 張貼comment 評論 character 字 include 包含 thumb 拇指
【題組】24. What’s the main idea of the article?
(A) People use English words differently in different countries.
(B) Languages are always changing and many new words come from technology.
(C) English is difficult to learn because it has words from other languages such as Japanese.
(D) The best way to study English is to use online dictionaries, which have many new words.Page 3