“Indeed，” George Washington wrote in his diary in 1985, “some kind of fly, or bug, had begun to eat the leaves before I left home.” But the father of America was not the father of bug. When Washington wrote that, Englishmen had been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century, and Americans had already created lighining-bug(萤火虫)。But the English were soon to stop using the bugs in their language, leaving it to the Americans to call a bug a bug in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The American bug could also be a person, referring to someone who was crazy about a particular activity. Althoug fan became the usual term. sports fans used to be called racing bugs, baseballbugs, and the like.
Or the bug could be a small machine or object, for example, a bug-shaped car. The bug could also be a burglar alarm, from which es the expression to bug, that is, “to install (安装) an alarm”. Now it means a small piece of equipment that people use for listening secretly to others’ conversation. Since the 1840s, to bug has long meant “to cheat”, and since the 1940s it has been annoying.
We also know the bug as a flaw in a puter program or other design. That meaning dates back to the time of Thomas Edison. In 1878 he explained bugs as “little problems and difficulties” that required months of study and labor to overe in developing a successful product. In 1889 it was recorded that Edison “had been up the two previous nights discovering ‘a bug’ in his invented record player.”
【小题1】We learn from Paragraph 1 that .A．Americans had difficulty in learning to use the word bugB．George Washington was the first person to call an insect a bugC．the word bug was still popularly used in English in the nineteenth centuryD．both Englishmen and Americans used the word bug in the eighteenth century【小题2】What does the word “flaw” in the last paragraph probably mean?A．Explanation.B．Finding.C．Origin.D．Fault.【小题3】The passage is mainly concerned with .A．the misunderstanding of the word bugB．the development of the word bugC．the public views of the word bugD．the special characteristics of the word bugD
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(答案→)D
解析：本文是一篇故事。文章讲述了英语bug一词的发展变化。
【小题1】D考查细节理解。根据文章第一段中的When Washington wrote that, Englishmen had been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century,和But the English were soon to stop using the bugs in their language, leaving it to the Americans to call a bug a bug in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.可知，在18世纪美国人和英国人都使用bug这个词汇。故选D。
【小题2】D考查猜测词义。根据文章第四段中的In 1878 he explained bugs as “little problems and difficulties” that required months of study and labor to overe in developing a successful product.可知，flaw意为：little problems and difficulties，缺点和不足。故选D。
【小题3】B考查文章的主旨要义。文章通过华盛顿使用bug一词的故事，阐述了美语和英语词汇发展的变化。