“Indeed,” George Washington wrote in his diary in 1785, “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 hade been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century, and Americans had already created lightning-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. Although fan became the usual term, sports fans used to be called racing bugs, baseball bugs, 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 Englishman 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：这是一篇叙述英语习语的小短文。主要叙述英语习语a littl bug的语义演变过程。英国人和美国都在18世纪的时候称bugs为昆虫；但是英国人后来就不用了，而美国人一直沿用bugs并且还可用来指人、机器、物体等，有时指电脑设计或者其他设计中的小毛病。
【小题1】细节理解题。根据When Washington wrote that, Englishmen hade been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century,当Washington在1785年日记中写到的时候，英国人已经称昆虫为bugs一个多世纪了，所以英国和美国都用这个词时应该是在18世纪，故选D。
【小题2】词义猜测题。根据That meaning dates back to the time of Thomas Edison. In 1878 he explained bugs as “little problems and difficulties” 既然把bugs 称为“little problems and difficulties”小问题和麻烦，这四个选项中只有D接近它，故选D。
【小题3】主旨大意题。根据本文主要叙述的是英语习语a littl bug的语义演变过程，故选B。