Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions by…
2019
Directions : Read the passage given below and answer the questions by selecting the correct/most appropriate options :
With more than 3,000 languages currently spoken, English undoubtedly is amongst the richest of all languages. The Oxford English Dictionary lists about half a million words of which only 2,00,000 are frequently used. This is because, the balance 3,00,000 words are technical and not found in ordinary dictionaries. The only language that can come near English is Chinese.
Apart from being the richest language, English also boasts of being one of the most widely spoken, second only to Mandarin Chinese. This remarkable achievement is only because of the one thing that we all love to do – copy ! ‘Siesta’ for example is of Spanish origin. ‘Sputnik’ as you must be aware of, has a Russian origin. ‘Restaurant’ is from France and ‘Super’ from Germany. Even before the birth of the ‘genius’ of ‘drama’, William Shakespeare, the words ‘genius’ and ‘drama’ were adapted from Greek. Now, you must be wondering if English has anything original about it. Well, find it out ! Did you ever try to find out how many different words of English we use in our daily life ? Try to guess and then read on. A modern novelist has a vocabulary of anywhere between ten to fifteen thousand words.
William Shakespeare used thirty thousand words and the only writer to come close to him was James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’. We normally have a vocabulary of about ten thousand words of which only five thousand are used in everyday conversation. This leads to a limited variety of words. This is because we repeat a lot of words. In conversation and in writing, it is ‘the’. (Try counting it in this article and you will have proof of it.)
English is the most widely used language in the world because :
- A.
Shakespeare has written in English.
- B.
it is the richest language.
- C.
it has taken words from other languages.
- D.
it has half a million words in it.
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: C
In reading-comprehension questions that ask "why" or "because", the correct option must restate a cause-and-effect relationship the passage explicitly states — not merely a fact the passage also happens to mention in a different context. The safest method is to locate the specific sentence that answers the question’s "why", rather than picking the most familiar-sounding fact from the passage.
The question asks why English is "the most widely used language in the world". The passage answers this directly: "Apart from being the richest language, English also boasts of being one of the most widely spoken, second only to Mandarin Chinese. This remarkable achievement is only because of the one thing that we all love to do – copy!" It then lists loanwords adopted from other languages -- ‘Siesta’ (Spanish), ‘Sputnik’ (Russian), ‘Restaurant’ (French), ‘Super’ (German), and ‘genius’/‘drama’ (Greek) -- as evidence of this borrowing. So the passage’s own explanation for widespread use is that English has taken (borrowed) words from other languages.
The other options describe different facts from the passage that do not answer this specific "why":
Shakespeare has written in English -- the passage discusses Shakespeare only in the vocabulary-size paragraph (he used about thirty thousand words), never as the reason for widespread use.
it is the richest language -- the passage explicitly separates being "the richest language" from being "widely spoken" with the word "Apart", treating them as two distinct claims with two distinct explanations.
it has half a million words in it -- this is the Oxford English Dictionary's total word count from the first paragraph, cited as a measure of richness, not as the reason English is widely spoken.
Only the borrowing/copying explanation is the passage’s stated cause for widespread use, so the correct option is "it has taken words from other languages."