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黑龙江省大庆市2017高考英语阅读理解暑假练习（7）及答案 【浙江省2017高考英语模拟冲刺卷】 The discovery that language can be a barrier (障碍) to communication is quickly made by all who travel, study, govern or sell. Whether the activity is tourism, research, government, policing or business, the lack of a common language can severely delay progress or can stop it altogether. Although communication problems of this kind must happen thousands of times each day, very few become public knowledge. Publicity comes only when a failure to communicate has major results, such as strikes, lost orders, legal problems or deadly accidents--even, at times, war. One reported example of communication failure took place in 1970, when several Americans ate a species of poisonous mushroom. No remedy was known, and two of the people died within days. A radio report of the case was heard by a chemist who knew of a treatment that had been successfully used in 1959 and published in 1963. Why had the American doctors not heard of it seven years later? Possibly because the report of the treatment had been published only in journals written in European languages other than English. Several comparable cases have been reported. But isolated (孤立的) examples do not give an impression of the size of the problem--something that can come only from studies of the use or avoidance of foreign-language materials and contacts in different communicative situations. In the English-speaking scientific world, for example, surveys of books and documents consulted in libraries and other information agencies have shown that very little foreign-language material is ever consulted. Library requests in the field of science and technology showed that only 13 percent were for foreign language journals. | 
