《2025年练习部分高中英语选择性必修第一册沪教版》

D Reading
Read the passage and complete the exercises.
False friends—marketing enemies
People learning a foreign language often recognize words that are similar to words in their own language. Sometimes these are helpful "friends"—a Dutch, German or Flemish speaker learning English can relax when they see the word hand—it's exactly the same in their language. When Germans see the English word handy, they might think they've found another friend, but this is a "false friend"—the English adjective handy means "convenient", whereas the German noun Handy is a word they use for "mobile phone"!
(1) ______ The German Handy is a good example of words being borrowed from another language in order to make something sound cool. In countries around the world, marketing and advertising executives often reach for the English dictionary, not because they really need to borrow a word, but because they want to borrow some of the status of English as the language of international communication. The message is: "Hey, look, I'm using English, I'm part of the modern global community." So, when it comes to British and American companies selling their products abroad, you might think that they only have to keep the English names and everyone will be happy. Unfortunately it's not as simple as that, and if English-speaking marketing departments don't do enough research into what their product names and slogans mean in other cultures, false friends can turn into costly enemies!
(2) ______ Car names are a good example of the problem. Ford's Fiera wasn't as popular with Spanish speakers as the company had hoped, possibly because fiera can mean "ugly" in Spanish. It's said that the well-known story that their Nova car suffered for a similar reason (Nova in Spanish would mean "doesn't go") is not actually true, but it illustrates the point well. Rolls-Royce fortunately realized that their Silver Mist needed a name change before being launched in Germany (in German Mist means "manure", the waste that comes out after a horse or cow has eaten!), where it became the Silver Shadow. The German marketing people seemed to do well with Handy, but the English term they borrowed for a certain type of rucksack—which is actually a German word!—wasn't such a good idea. Body bags are actually what dead bodies are put in when they are moved from the scene of a crime.
(3) ______ Having names and slogans translated into other languages isn't always an effective solution, especially with languages that are very different to English. In the rush to enter the growing Chinese market, the slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" was translated into Chinese as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead"! Kentucky Fried Chicken also had to do some more work on their idiomatic slogan "finger-lickin' Good", which was first translated to mean "eat your fingers off"!
(4) ______ Most problems can be avoided by checking product names and translations with enough local people in the target market. However, it's unusual for the result to be a perfect translation of the original marketing concept. "The concept will never translate perfectly into another culture," warns one marketing expert. It seems that the most embarrassing mistakes have been made by marketing teams who refuse to accept this. If a campaign has been very successful in one market, they will try their hardest to reuse it in a very different one, often failing to listen to what the locals say.
1 Match subheadings A-E to paragraphs 2-5. There is one heading that you do not need.
A. Errors in the East
B. Foreign is fashionable
C. Ask around
D. Successful slogans
E. Failures on four wheels
(1) ______ (2) ______ (3) ______ (4) ______

答案：
(1) B
(2) E
(3) A
(4) C
解析：段落2主要讲英语词汇因国际地位被视为时尚，对应B；段落3以汽车名称为例讲失败案例，对应E；段落4讲中文等差异大的语言翻译错误，对应A；段落5讲需与当地人核对，对应C。D未提及，为多余选项。