CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     Queen Elizabeth II’s pronunciation of English has been infected by her subjects, Aussie scientists say.
     Phoneticists from Sydney's Macquarie University studied archive recordings of the Queen's annual Christmas message to the Commonwealth from the 1950s to1980s, analyzing her Majesty's vowels.
     They then compared those vowels with the standard accent of southern England, as used by female British broadcasters on the BBC in the 1980s, to see how the royal accent had changed.
     Their conclusion: the cut-glass speech of the early years of the Queen's reign has become—how shall we say—somewhat commoner over the years.
     That in itself subtly mirrors the changes is Britain, from a country with a rigid social hierarchy(等级制度)four decades ago to one where class differences have blurred and in some areas disappeared.
     “The Queen's pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy,”the researchers say.
     Standard speech in southern England has been influenced by Cockneys(伦敦人), whose accent was initiated by Dick Van Dyke in the Walt Disney movie“Mary Poppins.”
     Purists will be reassured that the Queen's “Hice (house) of Windsor”will not become the Ouse of Windsor”(by dropping the‘h’) in the foreseeable future.
     However, there have been changes in 10 out of the 11 vowel sounds in the standard English.
     These changes bring her speech closer to that of her Cockney subjects, the researchers found.  
     An example of this is the way in which she pronounces “had”. In the 1950s, the royal pronunciation of this word almost rhymed with“bed”. But 30 years later, it had migrated halfway to the standard southern English pronunciation, which rhymes “had”with“had”.
     The Australian team say the pronunciation of all languages alters subtly over time, mainly because of influence from the young, and it is foolish for anyone to try to prevent change.
     “The chances of societies and academies successfully preserving a particular form of pronunciation against the influence of community and social changes are unlikely,” they say.
     The research was published December 21 in Nature, the British science weekly.