Номер 38, страница 18 - гдз по английскому языку 11 класс (enjoy english) учебник Биболетова, Бабушис

Аудиозапись номер четыре.

Exercise thirty eight.

Listen to the recording once again and fill in the table with the given information.

There are several thousand languages on our planet. According to different sources, somewhere between three thousand and eight thousand languages are spoken in the world at present. What are the most spoken of them? There are different estimates and figures may vary, but the ranking order is the same. The highest position in the world ranking occupies Mandarin Chinese, with more than eight hundred and seventy three million of native speakers and one hundred and seventy eight million of speakers of Chinese as a second language. So, today totally more than one thousand million people speak Mandarin Chinese. Then comes Spanish. About five hundred million people speak this language, including three hundred and twenty two million native speakers. The third place in the world ranking is taken by English. More than three hundred and nine million people speak English as a first and six hundred million as a second language. English may be one of the few languages on the list, where the number of native speakers is twice less than the number of second language speakers. Then goes Arabic. According to rough estimates, the number of speakers is the total population of Arab countries, which is about three hundred and twenty three million. Next three places are taken by Hindi, Portuguese and Bengali with one hundred and eighty one, one hundred and seventy seven and one hundred and seventy one million speakers correspondingly. Surprisingly, the total number of Hindi speakers is estimated as nine hundred and forty eight million, if people with significant knowledge of the language are taken into account. The number of second language speakers of Portuguese and Bengali is not very high in comparison with Hindi. It is about twenty million in both cases. The eighth place in the world ranking system is taken by Russian, with one hundred and forty five million native speakers, and about one hundred and ten million speakers of Russian as a second language. Next comes Japanese with one hundred and twenty eight million first language speakers and only two million second language speakers. These are the nine most spoken languages in the world.