TOEFL iBT Practice Test 46

Confirmation: Vehicle service booked Booking reference: SV-2291 Your car is booked in for its annual service on Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. A courtesy car is available on request, but must be arranged at least 48 hours ahead. Estimated completion time is 3 hours; we will call before starting any work costing over $100.

Newsletter: Oakfield Primary — Friday 6 June Sports Day is now on Thursday 19 June (the rain date is Friday 20 June). Children should wear their house T-shirts and bring a hat and a water bottle. Parents are warmly invited to watch from 1:30 p.m. Please note that the school will close at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday 18 June for teacher planning. Finally, thank you to all families who donated books to our reading corner; we received over 300!

Linguists estimate that roughly forty percent of the world's approximately seven thousand living languages are at risk of falling out of use within the coming decades, a process typically driven not by any single catastrophic event but by a gradual generational shift in which children of speakers grow up favouring a larger regional or national language perceived as offering greater economic or social opportunity. This shift often happens within just two or three generations: grandparents speak the ancestral language fluently, parents understand it but respond primarily in the dominant language, and children acquire only fragments, a pattern linguists sometimes call language shift rather than sudden language death. Documentation efforts, in which linguists work with remaining fluent speakers to record vocabulary, grammar, and oral traditions before a language disappears entirely, can preserve valuable scientific and cultural information, but most linguists now emphasise that documentation alone cannot prevent a language's loss as a living, spoken tradition; only continued transmission within families and communities can do that. Some revitalisation programs, such as immersion schools that teach young children primarily in an endangered language alongside standard subjects, have shown modest but genuine success in producing new fluent speakers, most notably in cases involving Indigenous languages in New Zealand and Hawaii, demonstrating that language shift, while common, is not always irreversible when a community actively commits resources and sustained effort to reversing it.