increasingly using American words such as garbage trash can sidewalk candy sneakers soda and flashlight.

　　The stories written by pupils aged 7 to 13 show how fairy cakes are referred to as cupcakes and a dinner jacket has become a tuxedo. "Smart" is now often used for "clever" and "cranky" for "irritable"．

　　Television also has a powerful influence on children's work with Lady Gaga and Argentinean footballer Lionel Messi among the famous names from TV cropping up repeatedly.

　　But pupils are let down by basic spelling punctuation and grammar according to the study by Oxford University Press (OUP) which looked at the entries to BBC Radio Two's "500 Words" competition.

　　Children struggled to correctly spell simple words such as "does" and "clothes" and often failed to use the past tense correctly frequently writing "rised" instead of "rose" or "thinked" instead of "thought"．

　　Researchers also found that punctuation was underused especially semi­colons and speech marks. Some did not know how to use capital letters. However exclamation marks were overused. Researchers found 35171 examples in total with some young writers using five at a time!

　　Popular US fiction such as the Twilight novels and films is thought to be fueling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling. Meanwhile fears that texting was corrupting children's written work were unfounded_they said with youngsters only using text language when they were referring to a text message.

　　Samantha Armstrong from OUP said: "Perhaps we are catching a glimpse of the language of the future." Chris Evans whose radio show runs the competition said the results were "fascinating"， adding: "Who'd have thought that Messi and Gaga would be some of the most used names？"

　　8. According to the passage which of the following is an example of British English?

　　A. sneakers B. fairy cakes

　　C. tuxedo D. cranky

解析：细节理解题。根据Researchers who looked at the entries to a national competition found they were increasingly using American words such as garbage