Very few people could understand the lecture the professor delivered because its subject was very ______.

Unlike most sports, which evolved over time from street games, basketball was designed by one man to suit a particular purpose. The man was Dr. James Naismith, and his purpose was to invent a vigorous game that could be played indoors in the winter. In 1891, Naismith was an instructor at a training school, which trained physical education instructors for the YMCAs, That year the school was trying【C1】______up with a physical activity that the men could enjoy【C2】______the football and baseball seasons. None of the standard indoor activities【C3】______their interest for long. Naismith was asked to solve the problem by the school. He first tried to【C4】______some of the popular outdoor sports, but they were all too rough. The men were getting bruised from tackling each other and【C5】______hit with equipment. So, Naismith decided to invent a game that would incorporate the most common elements of outdoor team sports without having the real physical contact. Most popular sports used a ball. So he chose a soccer ball because it was soft and large enough that it【C6】______no equipment, such as a bat or a racket to hit it. Next he decided【C7】______an elevated goal, so that scoring would depend on skill and accuracy rather than on【C8】______only. His goals were two peach baskets,【C9】______to ten-foot-high balconies at each end of the gym. The basic【C10】______of the game was to throw the ball into the basket. Naismith wrote rules for the game,【C11】______of which, though with some small changes, are still【C12】______effect. Basketball was an immediate success. The students【C13】______it to their friends, and the new sport quickly【C14】______on. Today, basketball is one of the most popular games【C15】______the world."

During the cold war the world was divided into the First, Second and Third Worlds. Those divisions are no longer relevant. It is far more meaningful now to group countries not in terms of their political or economic systems or in terms of their level of economic development but rather in terms of their culture and civilization. What do we mean when we talk of a civilization? A civilization is a cultural entity. Villages, regions, ethnic groups, nationalities, religious groups, all have distinct cultures at different levels of cultural heterogeneity. The culture of a village in southern Italy may be different from that of a village in northern Italy, but both will share in a common Italian culture that distinguishes them from German villages. European communities, in turn, will share cultural features that distinguish them from Arab or Chinese communities. Arabs, Chinese and Westerners, however, are not part of any broader cultural entity. They constitutes civilization. A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a European, or a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies. People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and boundaries of civilizations change. Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China ("a civilization pretending to be a state, as Lucian Pye put it"), or a very small number of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A civilization may include several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin American and Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization. Civilizations obviously blend and overlap, and may include subcivilizations. Western civilization has two major variants, European and North American, and Islam has its Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions. Civilizations are nonetheless meaningful entities, and while the lines between them are seldom sharp, they are real. Civilizations are dynamic; they rise and fall; they divide and merge. And, as any student of history knows, civilizations disappear and are buried in the sands of time. Westerners tend to think of nation states as the principle actors in global affairs. They have been that, however, for only a few centuries. The broader reaches of human history have been the history of civilizations. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee identified 21 major civilizations; only six of them exist in the contemporary world. Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another. According to the passage, what is a more meaningful way now to group countries as compared with the Cold War period?

When a person begins a mediated or immediate encounter, he already stands in some kind of social relationship to the others concerned, and expects to stand in a given relationship to them after the particular encounter ends. This, of course, is one of the ways in which social contacts are geared into the wider society. Much of the activity occurring during an encounter can be understood as an effort on everyone's part to get through the occasion and all the unanticipated and unintentional events that can cast participants in an undesirable light, without disrupting the relationships of the participants. And if relationships are in the process of change, the object will be to bring the encounter to a satisfactory close without altering the expected course of development. The perspective nicely accounts, for example, for the little ceremonies of greeting and farewell which occur when people begin a conversational encounter or depart from one. Greetings provide a way of showing that a relationship is still what it was at the termination of the previous co-participation, and, typically, that this relationship involves sufficient suppression of hostility for the participants temporarily to drop their guards and talk. Farewells sum up the effect of the encounter upon the relationship and show what the participants may expect of one another when they next meet. The enthusiasm of greetings compensates for the weakening of the relationship caused by the absence just terminated, while the enthusiasm of farewells compensates the relationship for the harm that is about to be done to it by separation. It seems to be a characteristic obligation of many social relationships that each of the members guarantees to support a given face for the other members in given situations. To prevent disruption of these relationships, it is therefore necessary for each member to avoid destroying the others' face. At the same time, it is often the person's social relationship with others that leads him to participate in certain encounters with them, where incidentally he will be dependent upon them for supporting his face. Furthermore, in many relationships, the members come to share a face, so that in the presence of third parties an improper act on the part of one member becomes a source of acute embarrassment to the other members. A social relationship, then, can be seen as a way in which the person is more than ordinarily forced to trust his self-image and face to the tact and good conduct of others. The last word of the first sentence, namely "ends", is most likely ______.

The operation could ______ her life by two or three years.

Most nurses are women, but in the higher ranks of the medical profession women are in a______.

He tried to cope with the ever-increasing burden of his work, but finally he ______ and had to take a complete rest.

The recovery and ______ of the country's economy has also been accompanied by increasing demands for high quality industrial sites inattractive locations.

A large part of human activity

He kept in constant contact with his family while he was in Australia.

Married people live "happily ever after" in fairy tales, but they do so less and less often in real life. I, like many of my friends, got married, divorced, and remarried. I suppose, to some people, I'm a failure. After all, I broke my first solemn promise to "love and cherish until death do us part." But I feel that I'm finally a success. I learned from the mistakes I made in my first marriage. This time around, the ways my husband and I share our free time, make decision, and deal with problems are very different. I learned, first of all, not to be a clinging vine (依赖男子的妇女). In my first marriage, I felt the every moment we spent apart was wasted. If Ray wanted to go out to a bar with his friends to watch a football game, I felt rejected and talked him into staying home. I wouldn't accept an offer to go to a movie or join an exercise class if it meant that Ray would be home alone. I realize now that we were often angry with each other just because we spent too much time together. In contrast, my second husband and I spend some of our free time apart and try to have interests of our own. I have started playing racquetball at a health club, and David sometimes takes off to go to the local auto races with his friends. When we are together, we aren't bored with each other, our separate interests make us more interesting people. I learned not only to be apart sometimes but also to work together when it's time to make decisions. When Ray and I were married, I left all the important decisions to him. He decided how we would spend money, whether we should sell the car or fix it, and where to take a vacation. I know now that I went along with this so that I wouldn't have to take the responsibility when things went wrong. I could always end an argument by saying, "It was your fault!" With my second marriage, I am trying to be a full partner. We ask each other's opinions on major decisions and try to compromise if we disagree. If we make the wrong choice, we're equally guilty. When we rented an apartment, for example, we both had to take the blame for not noticing the drafty windows and the "no pets" clause in our lease. Maybe the most important thing I've learned is to be a grown-up about facing problems. David and I have made a vow to face our troubles like adults. If we're mad at each other or worried and upset, we say how we feel. Rather than hide behind our own misery, we talk about the problem until we discover how to fix it. Everybody argues or has to deal with the occasional crisis, but Ray and I always reacted like children to these stormy times. I would lock myself in the spare bedroom. Ray would stalk out of the house, slam the door, and race off in the car. Then I would cry and worry till he returned. I wish that my first marriage hadn't been the place where I learned how to make a relationship work, but at least I did learn. I feel better now about being an independent person, about making decisions, and about facing problems. My second marriage isn't perfect, but it doesn't have the deep flaws that made the first one fall apart. Which of the following has contributed to the writer's divorce?

Violin prodigies, I learned

What percentage of the population in a modern technological society is, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen per cent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future. Technology and the division of labor have done two things: by eliminating in many fields the need for special strength or skill, they have made a very large number of paid occupations which formerly were enjoyable work into boring labor, and by increasing productivity they have reduced the number of necessary laboring hours. It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful. Indeed, the problem of dealing with boredom may be even more difficult for such a future mass society than it was for aristocracies. The latter, for example, ritualized their time; there was a season to shoot grouse, a season to spend in town, etc. The masses are more likely to replace an unchanging ritual by fashion which changes as often as possible in the economic interest of certain people. Again, the masses cannot go in for hunting, for very soon there would be no animals left to hunt. For other aristocratic amusements like gambling, dueling, and warfare, it may be only too easy to find equivalents in dangerous driving, drug-taking, and senseless acts of violence. Workers seldom commit acts of violence, because they can put their aggression into their work, be it physical like the work of a smith, or mental like the work of a scientist or an artist. The role of aggression in mental work is aptly expressed by the phrase "getting one's teeth into a problem". According to the passage, the writer believes the majority of the population

What our society suffers from most today is the absence of consensus about what it and life in it ought to be; such consensus cannot be gained from society's present stage, or from fantasies about what it ought to be. For that the present is too close and too diversified, and the future too uncertain, to make believable claims about it. A consensus in the present hence can be achieved only through a shared understanding of the past, as Homer's epics informed those who lived centuries later what it meant to be Greek, and by what images and ideals they were to live their lives and organize their societies. Most societies derive consensus from a long history, a language all their own, a common religion, common ancestry. The myths by which they live are based on all of these. But the United States is a country of immigrants, coming from a great variety of nations. Lately, it has been emphasized that an asocial, narcissistic personality has become characteristic of Americans, and that it is this type of personality that makes for the lack of well-being, because it prevents us from achieving consensus that would counteract a tendency to withdraw into private worlds. In this study of narcissism, Christopher Lash says that modern man, "tortured by self-consciousness, turns to new therapies not to free himself of his personal worries but to find meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for". There is widespread distress because national morale has declined, and we have lost an earlier sense of national vision and purpose. Contrary to rigid religions or political beliefs, as are found in totalitarian societies, our culture is one of the great individual differences, at least in principle and in theory; but this leads to disunity, even chaos. Americans believe in the value of diversity, but just because ours is a society based on individual diversity, it needs consensus about some dominating ideas more than societies based on uniform origin of their citizens. Hence, if we are to have consensus, it must be based on a myth—a vision about a common experience, a conquest that made us Americans, as the myth about the conquest of Troy formed the Greeks. Only a common myth can offer relief from the fear that life is without meaning or purpose. Myths permit us to examine our place in the world by comparing it to a shared idea. Myths are shared fantasies that form the tie that binds the individual to other members of his group. Such myths help to ward off feelings of isolations, guilt, anxiety, and purposelessness—in short, they combat isolation and the breakdown of social standards and values. In the eyes of the author, the greatest trouble with the U.S. society may lie in ______.

We strongly encourage discussion about the appropriateness of deceptive robots to determine what, if any, regulations or guidelines should ______ the development of these systems.

Most people can't get ______ the day without at least one cup of tea or coffee.

The electronic computer is______some of the tasks that were once accomplished by our own brains.

He quickened and ______ his walking pace as he heard the announcement in the loudspeakers that the train would leave in ten minutes.

Self-image is the picture you have of yourself

Consumers and producers obviously make decisions that mold the economy, but there is a third major【C1】______to consider the role of government. Government has a powerful【C2】______on the economy in at least four ways: Direct Services. The postal system, for example, is a federal system【C3】______the entire nation, as is the large and complex establishment. Conversely, the construction and【C4】______of most highways, the【C5】______of the individual states, and the public educational systems, despite a large funding role by the federal government, are primarily【C6】______for by country or city governments. Police and fire protection and sanitation【C7】______are also the responsibilities of local government. Regulation and Control. The government regulates and controls private【C8】______in many ways, for the【C9】______of assuring that business serves the best【C10】______of the people as a whole. Regulation is necessary in areas where private enterprise is granted a【C11】______, such as in telephone or electric service. Public policy permits such companies to make a reasonable【C12】______, but limits their ability to raise prices【C13】______, since the public depends on their services. Often control is【C14】______to protect the public, as for example, when the Food and Drug administration bans harmful drugs, or requires standards of【C15】______in food. In other industries, government sets guidelines to ensure fair competition without using direct control. Stabilization and Growth. Branches of government, including Congress and such entities as the Federal Reserve Board, attempt to control the extremes of boom and bust, of inflation and depression, by【C16】______tax rates, the money supply, and the use of credit. They can also【C17】______the economy through changes in the amount of public spending by the government itself. Direct Assistance. The government provides many kinds of help to【C18】______and individuals. For example, tariffs【C19】______certain products to remain relatively free of foreign competition; imports are sometimes taxed so that American products are able to【C20】______better with certain foreign goods. In quite a different area, government supports individuals who cannot adequately care for themselves, by making grants to working parents with dependent children, by providing medical care for the aged and the indigent, and through social welfare system."