Questão 2022067

INSTRUCTIONS: Read the texts carefully and choose the best alternative, according to them.

Text 1

Learn English online: How the internet is changing language

1 Online English has become a common language for users from around the world. In the process, the

language itself is changing.

When America emerged from the ashes of a bruising war with Britain in 1814, the nation was far from

united. Noah Webster thought that a common language would bring people together and help create a new

5 identity that would make the country truly independent of the British.

Webster's dictionary, now in its 11th edition, adopted the Americanised spellings familiar today – er instead

of re in theatre, dropping the u from colour, and losing the double l from words such as traveller. It also

documented new words that were uniquely American such as skunk, opossum, hickory, squash and

chowder.

10 An American Dictionary of the English Language took 18 years to complete and Webster learned 26 other

languages in order to research the etymology of its 70,000 entries.

The internet is creating a similar language evolution, but at a much faster pace.

There are now thought to be some 4.5 billion web pages worldwide. And with half the population of China

now on line, many of them are written in Chinese.

15 Still, some linguists predict that within 10 years English will dominate the internet – but in forms very

different to what we accept and recognise as English today.

That's because people who speak English as a second language already outnumber native speakers. And

increasingly they use it to communicate with other non-native speakers, particularly on the internet where

less attention is paid to grammar and spelling and users don't have to worry about their accent.

Fonte: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20332763

Acesso em 16 /julho/2015.

Assinale a afirmativa que melhor define a palavra sublinhada na frase “dropping the u from colour” (linha 7), no contexto em que se encontra.