Notes:
federal (政府・国家が)連邦政府の
claim to　～すると主張する
census　国勢調査
Tagalog　タガログ語
Vietnamese　ベトナム語
**********************
Last time I told you that South Africa has 11 official languages, but did you know that on the federal level, the United States doesn’t have any official languages even though 96% of the population claims to speak it “well” or “very well”? Once every 10 years, we take a census in the US. In the year 2000, 215 million people over the age of five said their only language at home was English. The next most popular language was Spanish, with 28 million people. Chinese languages, French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Italian were next; each had over 1 million speakers. I guess that’s why they call the US a salad bowl. (by Prof. Carmella Lieske)
**********************

Notes：
acronym 頭文字;
UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) カリフォルニア大学ロサンゼルス校;
UF (University of Florida) フロリダ大学;
smoother よりな なめらかにする;
remaining 残っている;
cumbersome長くて複雑な;
********************
TOEIC and listening exercises often use them. And, if you listen to or read about sports, you’ve probably heard them – acronyms that are pronounced like words – things like UCLA and UF. These are the names of American universities.
We shorten them to make our conversation smoother. Each letter represents a word. The U stands for university.The next letter is often a state name. For example, C represents California. The remaining letters show where the campus is. For example, LA means Los Angeles, so UCLA is the University of California, Los Angeles. We do the same thing in Japanese when we say ShimaDai rather than the more cumbersome Shimane Daigaku.(by Prof. Lieske Carmella)
********************