The law on drinking and driving is ______ stated.

The noise is so faint that the engineers have to ______ their ears to hear it.

The only safe way of distinguishing between edible and poisonous mushrooms is to learn to______the individual species.

Do you think that all human beings have a "comfort zone" regulating the distance they stand from someone when they talk? This distance varies in interesting ways among people of different cultures. Greeks, others of the Eastern Mediterranean, and many of those from South America normally stand quite close together when they talk, often moving their faces even closer as they warm up in a conversation. North Americans find this awkward and often back away a few inches. Studies have found that they tend to feel most comfortable at about 21 inches apart. In much of Asia and Africa, there is even more space between two speakers in conversation. This greater space subtly lends an air of dignity and respect. This manner of space is nearly always unconscious, but it is interesting to observe. This difference applies also to the closeness with which people sit together, the extent to which they lean over one another in conversation, and how they move as they argue or make an emphatic point. In the United States, for example, people try to keep their bodies apart even in a crowded elevator; in Paris they take it as it comes! Although North Americans have a relatively wide "comfort zone" for talking, they communicate a great deal with their hands—not only with gesture but also with touch. They put a sympathetic hand on a person's shoulder to demonstrate warmth of feeling or an arm around him in sympathy; they nudge a man in the ribs to emphasize a funny story; they put an arm in reassurance or stroke a child's head in affection; they readily take someone's arm to help him cross a street or direct him along an unfamiliar route. To many people—especially those from Asia or the Moslem countries—such bodily contact is unwelcome, especially if inadvertently done with the left hand. The left hand carries no special significance in the U. S. Many Americans are simply left-handed and use that hand more. In terms of bodily distance, North Americans ______.

What had begun as good-natured teasing quickly gave way to ______ as the lost hikers blamed one another for their predicament.

Once upon a time

He offered her a trip to Australia but she______him______flat.

The key to the popularity of aluminum is its incredible ______.

There was nothing we could do______wait.

Next week you'd better bring all your questions here. We're going to have a question-and-answer______.

______ of the Pennsylvania Gazette

From the moment of his birth the ______ into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.

Some people think it's______to smoke with a cigarette holder.

She complained that the treatment she received in the hospital had completely ______ her of her dignity.

It goes without saying that people who refuse to ______ with the law will be punished.

As the society has rigid social ______

The vision of that big black car hitting the sidewalk a few feet from us will never be ______ from my memory.

As the global village continues to shrink and cultures collide, it is essential for all of us to become more sensitive, more aware of, and more observant to the body language (motions/gestures) that surround us each day. And as many of us cross over cultural borders, it would be fitting for us to respect, learn, and understand more about the effective and powerful "silent language" of gestures. Without gestures, our world would be static and colorless. The social anthropologist, Edward T. Hall claims 60 percent of all our communication is nonverbal. In that case, bow can we possibly communicate with one another without gestures? The world is a giddy montage (蒙太奇) of vivid gestures—the ones used by traffic police, street vendors, expressway drivers, teachers, children on playground and athletes with their exuberant (热情洋溢的) hugging, clenched fists and "high fives". People all over the world use their hands, heads, and bodies to communicate expressively. Gestures and body language communicate as effectively as words—maybe even more effectively. We use gestures daily, almost instinctively, from beckoning to a waiter, or punctuating a business presentation with visual signals to airport ground attendants guiding an airline pilot into the jet-way or a parent using a whole dictionary of gestures to teach a child. Gestures are woven into our social lives. The "vocabulary" of gestures can be at once informative and entertaining...but also dangerous. Gestures can be menacing, warm, instructive, or even sensuous. Bear in mind that some gestures are in general use, but there may always be exceptions. In recent years, Western and contemporary values and ideas have become more popular and have either influenced, altered, and even replaced some of the more traditional gestures. Understanding human behavior is tricky stuff. No two people behave in precisely the same way. Nor do people from the same culture all perform exactly the same gestures and body language uniformly. For almost any gestures there will probably be a minority within a given nationality who might say, "Well, some might attach that meaning to it, but to me it means..." and then they will provide a different interpretation. In the world of gestures, the best single piece of advice is to remember the two A's—"ask" and be "aware". If you see a motion or gesture that is new or confusing, ask a local person what it signifies. Then, be aware of the many body signs and customs around you. What is the main purpose of the first paragraph?

Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to define it. It seems as natural to man as walking and only less so than breathing. Yet it needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing from the process of learning to walk. In the case of the latter function, culture, in other words, the traditional body of social usage, is not seriously brought into play. The child is individually equipped, by the complex set of factors that we term biological heredity, to make all the needed muscular and nervous adjustments that result in walking. Indeed, the very conformation of these muscles and of the appropriate parts of the nervous system may be said to be primarily adapted to the movements made in walking and in similar activities. In a very real sense, the normal human being is predestined to walk, not because his elders will assist him to learn the art, but because his organism is prepared from birth, or even from the moment of conception, to take on all those expenditures of nervous energy and all those muscular adaptations that result in walking. To put it concisely, walking is an inherent, biological function of man. Not so language. It is of course true that in a certain sense the individual is predestined to talk, but that is due entirely to the circumstance that he is born not merely in nature, but in the lap of a society that is certain, reasonably certain, to lead him to its traditions. Eliminate society and there is every reason to believe that he will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives at all. But it is just as certain that he will never learn to talk, that is, to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society. Or, again, remove the new-born individual from the social environment into which he has come and transplant him to an utterly alien one. He will develop the art of walking in his new environment very much as he would have developed it in the old. But his speech will be completely at variance with the speech of his native environment. Walking then is a general human activity that varies only within a restricted limit as we pass from individual to individual. Its variability is purposeless. Speech is a human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social group to social group, because it is a purely historical heritage, the product of long-continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies—not as consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples. Walking is an organic, instinctive function, speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, "cultural" function. The first sentence of Paragraph Two, "Not so language" is the closest in meaning to ______.

Some pundits ______ that many computers are obsolete before they're even designed, which goes a long way toward explaining why the ATM at my grocery store never works.