The English Spoken Across The Atlantic Nevertheless Began To Receive GMAT Reading Comprehension

Reading Passage Question

The English spoken across the Atlantic nevertheless began to receive admiring commentaries from British visitors. William Eddis, who toured the colonies in 1770, was surprised to find that 'the language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent, from its British or foreign parentage.

A few years later, another visitor noted; 'It is a curious fact that there is perhaps no one portion of the British empire, in which two or three millions of persons speak their mother-tongue with greater purity, or a truer pronunciation, than the white inhabitants of the United States. And even John Witherspoon noted that 'the vulgar in America speak much better than the vulgar in England.’

L.Dillard has suggested that the colonists created a koine language-a kind of standardized dialect that often emerges among a group of emigrants speaking various dialects of one basic language. When the colonists came to North America, they left behind their old social order, including the social rankings of dialects. They came in contact with a wide range of other languages: the foreign tongues of the maritime trade, the Creoles of slaves, the languages of the Indians. These influences accelerated the breakdown of the colonists' English regional dialects and resulted in the formation of a naturally standardized American speech pattern, which British visitors later discovered and praised.

English opinions of American speech, of course, were of relatively little interest to the colonists, who quite impolitely proceeded to separate themselves from the empire. In the aftermath of the Revolution, there was understandably even less of an urge to subscribe to English authority, in matters of language or anything else, and the Americans embarked on a period of furious growth, industry and, occasionally, romanticism.

“The English spoken across the Atlantic nevertheless began to receive”- is a passage for the GMAT that addresses reading comprehension. Candidates must have a firm understanding of GMAT reading comprehension in English. This GMAT reading comprehension section consists of eight comprehension questions. The purpose of the GMAT Reading Comprehension questions is to assess a candidate's capacity to understand, evaluate, and apply knowledge or ideas. By responding to the GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions section, candidates can actively practice.

Solutions and Explanation

1. The author of this passage points out that favorable appraisals by the English of the qualities of American speech:

1. were encouraging to American colonists, who accelerated the breakdown of English dialects
2. were of little interest to American colonists, who energetically promoted the formation of a standard speech
3. were increasingly sensitive to the dialectal divergence of the colonists' speech patterns from the standard language
4. reflected the admiration of English visitors for the uniformity and purity of the Americans' language
5. derived from the English visitors' comparison of the language of the mercantile classes and the language of the vulgar in America

2. The author provides information that would answer which of the following questions?

1. Which expressions of English authority in matters of language did the colonists ignore in their creation of American English?
2. Which circumstances induced the colonists to create a standardized speech with remarkable pronunciation and purity of usage?
3. Which factors-geographic or linguistic-contributed most definitively to the colonists' creation of a new speech pattern?
4. Which opinions of Americans concerning English speech were reflected in the vernacular?
5. Which factors predisposed American speakers to vulgarity in speech?

3. A promiscuous ancestry is one that is:

1. vulgar
2. mixed
3. licentious
4. homogeneous
5. differentiated according to social rank

4. The approving commentary of English visitors to the American colonies on the quality of the language spoken by the colonists reflects:

1. gratification
2. provincial bias
3. mystified surprise
4. fulfilled expectation
5. self-congratulatory class prejudice

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