Linguist on a Mission

Read paragraph 7.

The Inughuits thought they were the world’s

only inhabitants until an expedition led by the

Scottish explorer John Ross came across them

in 1818.

The author’s purpose for including this information in the selection is most likely to —

• Describe the history of Europeans traveling to Greenland in order to study the Inughuits.

• Suggest that Ross’s expedition indirectly caused the destruction of Inughuit culture

• Support the claim that the Inughuits have a strong cultural heritage

• Emphasize how geographically and culturally isolated the Inughuits once were

Which sentence supports the idea that the life of the Inughuits now is not very different from

how it has always been?

• Leonard, an anthropological linguist, is to spend a year living with the Inughuit people of northwest Greenland. . . .

• Many of the men spend weeks away from home hunting seals, narwhal, walruses, whales and other mammals.

• “One thing I have been told is that they are tired of journalists popping in and reporting how awful it is. . . .”

• “Then they’ll have to move south and in all probability move in to modern flats.”

What does Leonard predict will cause the Inughuits to move south?

• The end of their distinctive cultural heritage

• The desire to move into modern housing

• The loss of their traditional language

• The effects of climate change on their environment

Which of these best describes the author’s purpose for writing this article?

• To criticize the failure of linguists to document a language before it was nearly extinct.

• To analyze the linguistic elements of one of the oldest and most pure Inuit dialects

• To inform the public of a researcher’s effort to document a disappearing language

• To argue that the Inuktun dialect will inevitably be lost in the next 10 to 15 years

Which of the following statements best characterizes the objective of the boxed information

titled “Did You Know?”

• To provide multiple theories for why languages disappear

• To highlight the effects of climate change described in the article

• To provide facts about languages that are disappearing

• To suggest that it is possible to prevent languages from disappearing