Some 500 million birds ______ each year from Africa, some weighing as little as nine grammes (three-tenths of an ounce).

World Trade Organization Director-general Renato Ruggiero predicted that the WTO would boost global incomes by $1 trillion in the next ten years. The pact paves the way for more foreign investment and competition in telecom markets. Many governments are making telecom deregulation a priority and making it easier for outsiders to enter the telecommunication business. The pace varies widely. The U. S. and Britain are well ahead of the pack, while Thailand won't be fully open until 2006. Only 20% of the $601 billion world market is currently open to competition. That should jump to about 75% in a couple of years—largely due to the Telecom Act in the U.S. last year that deregulated local markets, the opening up of the European Union's markets from Jan. 1, 1998 and the deregulation in Japan. The WTO deal now provides a forum for the inevitable disputes along the way. It is also symbolic: the first major trade agreement of the post-industrial age. Instead of being obsessed with textile quotas, the WTO pact is proof that governments are realizing that in an information age, telecom is the oil and steel of economies in the future. Businesses around the world are already spending more in total on telecom services than they do on oil. Consumers, meanwhile, can look forward to a future of lower prices—by some estimates, international calling rates should drop 80% over several years—and better service. Thanks in part to the vastly increased call volume carded by the fiber-optic cables that span the globe today, calling half a world away already costs little more than telephoning next door. The monopolies can no longer set high prices for international calls in many countries. In the U.S., the world's most fiercely competitive long distance market, frequent callers since last year have been paying about 12 cents a minute to call Britain, a price not much more than domestic rates. The new competitive environment on the horizon means more opportunities for companies from the U.S. and U.K. in particular because they have plenty of practice at the rough-and-tumble of free markets. The U.S. lobbied hard for the WTO deal, confident that its firms would be big beneficiaries of more open markets. Britain has been deregulated since 1984 but will see even more competition than before: in December, the government issued 45 new international licenses to join British Telecom so that it will become a strong competitor in the international market. However, the once-cosseted industry will get rougher worldwide. Returns on capital will come down. Risks will go up. That is how free markets work. It will look like any other business. Which of the following statements can best describe the main theme of the passage?

Some might consider it an ugly truth that attractive people are often more successful than those______blessed with looks.

Why is there______traffic on the streets today than yesterday?

We must ______ that the experiment is controlled as rigidly as possible.

She criticized my writing but in a way that was very______.

His production techniques are elaborate and near legendary, but even if they could be______, it wouldn't be the same for any other people.

Extraordinary creative activity has been characterized as revolutionary, flying in the face of what is established and producing not what is acceptable but what will become accepted. According to this formulation, highly creative activity transcends the limits of an existing form and establishes a new principle of organization. However, the idea that extraordinary creativity transcends established limits is misleading when it is applied to the arts, even though it may be valid for the sciences. Differences between highly creative art and highly creative science arise in part from a difference in their goals. For the sciences, a new theory is the goal and end result of the creative act. Innovative science produces new propositions in terms of which diverse phenomena can be related to one another in more coherent ways. Such phenomena as a brilliant diamond or a nesting bird are relegated to the role of data, serving as the means for formulating or testing a new theory. The goal of highly creative art is very different: the phenomenon itself becomes the direct product of the creative act. Shakespeare's Hamlet is not a tract about the behavior of indecisive princes or the uses of political power, nor is Picasso's painting em>Guernica/em> primarily a prepositional statement about the Spanish Civil War or the evils of fascism. What highly creative artistic activity produces is not a new generalization that transcends established limits, but rather an aesthetic particular. Aesthetic particulars produced by the highly creative artist extend or exploit, in an innovative way, the limits of an existing form, rather than transcend that form. This is not to deny that a highly creative artist sometimes established a new principle of organization in the history of an artistic field, the composer Monteverdi, who created music of the highest aesthetic value, comes to mind. More generally, however, whether or not a composition establishes a new principle in the history of music has little bearing on its aesthetic worth. Because they embody a new principle of organization, some musical works, such as the opera of the Florentine Camerata, are of signal historical importance, but few listeners or musicologists would include these among the great works of music. On the other hand, Mozart's em>The Marriage of Figaro/em> is surely among the masterpieces of music even though its modest innovations are confined to extending existing means. It has been said of Beethoven that he toppled the rules and freed music from the stifling confines of convention. But a close study of his compositions reveals that Beethoven overturned no fundamental rules. Rather, he was an incomparable strategist who exploited limits—the rules, forms, and conventions that he inherited from predecessors such as Haydn and Mozart, Handel and Bach—in strikingly original ways. The author considers a new theory that coherently relates diverse phenomena to one another to be the ______.

The scenery of the Way-lee-way had charmed the travelers with its mingled ______ and grandeur and filled them with admiration and astonishment.

The weather wasn't favorable and both teams had to ______ icy rain and a strong wind during the match.

The Supreme Court's decisions on physician assisted suicide carry important implications for how medicine seeks to relieve dying patients of pain and suffering. Although it ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the Court in effect supported the medical principle of "double effect", a centuries-old moral principle holding that an action shaving two effects—a good one that is intended and a harmful one that is foreseen—is permissible if the actor intends only the good effect. Doctors have used that principle in recent years to justify using high doses of morphine to control terminally ill patients' pain, even though increasing dosages will eventually kill the patient. Nancy Dubler, director of Montefiore Medical Center, contends that the principle will shield doctors who "until now have very, very strongly insisted that they could not give patients sufficient mediation to control their pain if that might hasten death." George Annas, chair of the health law department at Boston University, maintains that, as long as a doctor prescribes a drug for a legitimate medical purpose, the doctor has done nothing illegal even if the patient uses the drug to hasten death. "It's like surgery," he says. "We don't call those deaths homicides because the doctors didn't intend to kill their patients, although they risked their death. If you're a physician, you can risk your patient's suicide as long as you don't intend their suicide." On another level, many in the medical community acknowledge that the assisted-suicide debate has been fueled in part by the despair of patients for whom modern medicine has prolonged the physical agony of dying. Just three weeks before the Court's ruling on physician assisted suicide, the National Academy of Science (NAS) released a two volume report, em>Approaching Death: Improving Care at the End of Life/em>. It identifies the undertreatment of pain and the aggressive use of "ineffectual and forced medical procedures that may prolong and even dishonor the period of dying" as the twin problems of end of life care. The profession is taking steps to require young doctors to train in hospitals, to test knowledge of aggressive pain management therapies, to develop a medicare billing code for hospital based care, and to develop new standards for assessing and treating pain at the end of life. Annas says lawyers can play a key role in insisting that these well meaning medical initiatives translate into better care. "Large numbers of physicians seem unconcerned with the pain their patients are needlessly and predictably suffering," to the extent that it constitutes "systematic patient abuse". He says medical licensing boards "must make it clear...that painful deaths are presumptively ones that are incompetently managed and should result in license suspension." From the first three paragraphs, we learn that ______.

John used to be such a computer buff that he spent a large part of his income ______ his computer whenever a new CPU was introduced.

据心理学家称，乐观和自信是健康的心理状态所应具备的要素。焦虑是一种心理问题，他源自对生活中的不确定因素的内在恐惧

In the case of mobile phones

The computer doesn't______human thought; it reaches the same ends by different means.

______in their island community, the various tribes used languages which became more and more similar to each other.

History was being catalogued here

To plagiarize is simply "to use without ______ credit the ideas, expressions, or productions of (another)," and this is remarkably easy to do unintentionally.

The patterns of spoken language are ______ from those of writing.

The director of the research institute came in person to______that everything was all right.