根据短文内容及首字母提示,填写所缺单词,并将答案填写在答题卡标号为1-10的相应位置上.
February 21 is International Mother Language Day. The United Nations (联合国) n it in 1999. The day aims to protect all languages around the world. In China, most people speak Chinese as their mother language.
More people speak Chinese than any other language in the world. About one fifth of the world’s population speaks a form of Chinese, the BBC  r  .
The e   known written record of Chinese is the oracle bone script(甲骨文) of the Shang Dynasty . These are animal bones, especially tortoise shells with writing on them. Most Chinese characters are ideograms(表意文字) w    combine(组合) two or more words together to make a new one, for example, jia(家) means “a pig under a roof”. This shows that people in ancient times t   of home as a place to hold treasures..
As time went on, hundreds of thousands of words developed. However, people only use a few thousand of them in everyday life. Today, new words are still being a     to the Chinese dictionary, such as dishi(的士) for taxis, xiu(秀) for TV shows.
With the fast d   of China’s economy(经济), more people from other countries are showing i   in Chinese. In a survey in the US last December, 2007 people were asked,”Which new foreign language would you learn?” Chinese placed second, a   Spanish, with 15 percent of the vote.
Confucius Institutes(孔子学院) around the world are more p   than ever. More than 300 colleges in over 90 countries have Confucius Institutes, USA Today reported.