Номер 23, страница 126, part 1 - гдз по английскому языку 5 класс учебник Афанасьева, Михеева

English, the language of the world.

Countries where people use English as their native language are English speaking countries.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are English speaking countries.

These countries are situated on different continents.

People of different nationalities speak it.

And the English language they use is not absolutely the same.

For example, in the UK people have different accents according to the part of the country they come from.

But all these people easily understand each other.

What is language?

Why do we need it?

When people live in the same place and talk the same way, the words and structures they use are language.

We use words all the time to tell other people what we think and we want to be sure that they understand us.

We don't want to feel lonely. We want to talk to each other. That's why we have languages.

Today there are more than three thousand languages in the world.

They include English, German, French, Russian, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Japanese and many others.

You learn to speak when you are very young.

You probably don't even think that you are learning anything.

The language that you speak is the language you hear around you as you are growing up.

The language your family and friends speak.

If you are born in Russia, your native language is probably Russian.

But you may speak some other languages too.

A baby can learn any language he or she hears.

In some families people use two or more languages, and children there are often bilingual.

The English language appeared in the fifth century of the common era.

For more than ten centuries, people spoke English only on the territory of the British Isles.

Certainly, Old English and the English language the British speak nowadays are not absolutely the same.

But these days people use a lot of words that came from Old English.

When we speak about the most important things in life, we use Old English words.

Man, woman and child, eat, drink and sleep, live, love and die.

In the sixteenth century people began to speak English not only on the territory of the British Isles, but in other European countries.

After Columbus discovered America, lots of Europeans moved there.

The English language became the official language of the United States and, together with French, the official language of Canada.

In the eighteenth century Captain James Cook, a British sailor and explorer, sailed to Australia and New Zealand.

These territories became British. And many men and women from the UK moved there. They brought English with them.

Today English has become one of the most important languages of our planet.

People learn it as a foreign language in Europe and Asia, in South America and Africa, practically in all countries.

When you know English, it is easy to speak with people of different nationalities if they also know it.

But if you both speak only national languages, it will be nearly impossible for you to understand each other.