ACT English & Reading · Transitions
Which choice most effectively completes the sentence with the specific distinction this paragraph goes on to explain?
Teaching a Language to Speak Again
For roughly two thousand years, Hebrew survived without anyone actually speaking it as a first language. It remained very much alive in prayer, in religious study, and in scholarly writing, but the everyday task of raising a child, ordering food, or arguing about politics had, for centuries, fallen to whatever local language a Jewish community happened to speak wherever it lived. [1] Eliezer Ben-Yehuda arrived in Palestine in 1881 believing this arrangement did not have to be permanent.
His specific goal was narrower and more ambitious than simply promoting interest in Hebrew. [2] Ben-Yehuda wanted Hebrew restored as a genuine, everyday spoken language, used for the same ordinary purposes any living language serves its speakers. [3] The scale of the problem this goal created becomes clear once a single obvious fact is stated directly: [4] a language built almost entirely around ancient religious and literary vocabulary has no existing word for a great many things a modern household actually needs to discuss.
Ben-Yehuda's response to this gap was direct. [5] He simply began inventing words, coining Hebrew terms for concepts the ancient language had never needed to name, and he kept doing this for the rest of his working life. [6] By the end of his life, he had helped standardize and popularize a large modern Hebrew vocabulary, drawing both on older Hebrew sources and on newly coined terms.
Perhaps the most striking part of his strategy involved his own family. [7] When his first son was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda made a specific, demanding request of his wife: raise the child hearing only Hebrew, from every visitor and family member, for every ordinary need a small child has. [8] If a language that had produced no native speakers for roughly two thousand years could produce even one again, inside a single household, the larger project suddenly looked considerably less impossible.
The broader effort succeeded on a scale far beyond one household. [9] By 1922, barely four decades after Ben-Yehuda's arrival, Hebrew had gained official recognition as a language of British Mandate Palestine, spoken not just by his own children but by a growing community of settlers who had adopted it as their common language. Linguists studying language revitalization efforts around the world still point to this case as the clearest example of a language moving from purely ceremonial use back into full, ordinary daily life. [10]
His specific goal was narrower and more ambitious than simply promoting interest in Hebrew. [2] Ben-Yehuda wanted Hebrew restored as a genuine, everyday spoken language, used for the same ordinary purposes any living language serves its speakers. [3] The scale of the problem this goal created becomes clear once a single obvious fact is stated directly: [4] a language built almost entirely around ancient religious and literary vocabulary has no existing word for a great many things a modern household actually needs to discuss.
Ben-Yehuda's response to this gap was direct. [5] He simply began inventing words, coining Hebrew terms for concepts the ancient language had never needed to name, and he kept doing this for the rest of his working life. [6] By the end of his life, he had helped standardize and popularize a large modern Hebrew vocabulary, drawing both on older Hebrew sources and on newly coined terms.
Perhaps the most striking part of his strategy involved his own family. [7] When his first son was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda made a specific, demanding request of his wife: raise the child hearing only Hebrew, from every visitor and family member, for every ordinary need a small child has. [8] If a language that had produced no native speakers for roughly two thousand years could produce even one again, inside a single household, the larger project suddenly looked considerably less impossible.
The broader effort succeeded on a scale far beyond one household. [9] By 1922, barely four decades after Ben-Yehuda's arrival, Hebrew had gained official recognition as a language of British Mandate Palestine, spoken not just by his own children but by a growing community of settlers who had adopted it as their common language. Linguists studying language revitalization efforts around the world still point to this case as the clearest example of a language moving from purely ceremonial use back into full, ordinary daily life. [10]
Which choice most effectively completes the sentence with the specific distinction this paragraph goes on to explain?
Answer and explanation
Answer: D: and this goal required solving a problem no simple promotional campaign could fix.
This choice precisely sets up the specific, practical problem, missing modern vocabulary, that the rest of the paragraph explains in detail, distinguishing Ben-Yehuda's ambitious goal from a simpler awareness campaign. Choice B introduces an inaccurate claim of early religious support, contradicted by other historical accounts of the period's actual reception. A introduces an unsupported claim about historical dispute the passage does not address. C, in this context, lacks this precise, problem-setting framing.
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