Many people dread going on foreign assignments—sometimes even before they've gone on one. They hear stories about how exhausting and disorienting business travel can be. They worry about getting sick, getting lonely, or getting killed. They're afraid they won't be liked or that they won't succeed. But the fact is that for many people a foreign assignment can be the opportunity and thrill of a lifetime. The em>Wall Street Journal/em> reports the story of John Aliberti, who had spent his career working to become a midlevel manager for Union Switch in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aliberti seemed like an odd choice for an overseas assignment: He had no experience in international travel and business. But when he was chosen to represent the company as technical expert and representative in China, Aliberti responded with enthusiasm: "Back home, the work we do, it's been done for decades. In China you're breaking new ground. It's a milestone in the history of the world." By viewing his China assignment as an exciting adventure, Aliberti largely bypassed the negative effects of culture shock. According to the em>Wall Street Journal/em>, "The crowds and chaotic lines don't faze him. He becomes animated telling stories of long train trips to out-of-the-way cities like Nanchang, where Union Switch is helping to build a railroad yard..." Aliberti's enthusiastic attitude and his active interest in learning about the culture and business practices in China have helped him become a central figure in his company's China operations. His job in Pittsburgh is two rungs below vice president. In China, according to his boss, "He acts like a president or CEO. That's got to turn him on." John Aliberti seemed like an odd choice for overseas assignment because ______.

Just after nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning in June, an environmental activist named Bill Kayong was shot and killed while sitting in his pickup truck, waiting for a traffic light to change in the Malaysian city of Miri, on the island of Borneo. Kayong had been working with a group of villagers who were trying to reclaim land that the local government had transferred to a Malaysian palm-oil company. A few days after the murder, the police identified Stephen Lee Kiang, a director and major shareholder of the company, Tung HuatNiah Plantation, as a suspect in the crime, but Kiang flew to Australia before he could be questioned by authorities. (Three other individuals were eventually charged in the case.) Around the world, environmental and human-fights activists added Kayong's death to the tally of violent incidents connected to the production of palm oil, which has quietly become one of the most indispensable substances on Earth. The World Wildlife Fund says that half of the items currently on American grocery-store shelves contain some form of palm oil. The move away from trans fats in processed foods as a particular boon for the industry—semi-solid at room temperature, palm oil emerged as an ideal swap-in for the partially hydrogenated oils formerly used to enhance the texture, flavor, and shelf life of products like cookies and crackers. Since 2002, when a report from the National Academy of Sciences found a link between trans fats and heart disease, palm-oil imports to the U. S. have risen four hundred and forty-six percent, and have topped a million metric tons in recent years. Eighty-five percent of the palm oil produced today comes from Indonesia or Malaysia. Rising palm-oil exports have helped both countries make enormous economic strides in the past few decades, but the growth has come at a cost: deforestation rates in both places have been listed among the highest in the world. The habitat destruction brought about by palm-oil production has helped push scores of the region's species, including orangutans and Sumatran elephants, rhinos, and tigers, to the brink of extinction. And, mostly thanks to palm-oil production, Indonesia can boast some of the world's highest levels of greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet it is violence—against local populations, farmers, and activists—that has human-rights groups closely watching the palm-oil industry. The reports are often sad echoes of one another. In 2012, a human-rights lawyer named Antonio Trejo Cabrera was ambushed by gunmen while walking out of a church in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Trejo had been representing local peasant organizations in a fight against the palm-oil company GrupoDinant, and had recently won a handful of cases forcing the company's plantations to be turned over to local residents. In September of last year, a twenty-eight-year-old Guatemal an schoolteacher named Rigoberto Lima Choc was killed on the steps of a courthouse in the city of Sayaxche. Choc had led a group of activists that had filed a criminal complaint against the palm-oil company Reforestadora de Palmas del Peten, S.A., known as REPSA, based on evidence that REPSA's overflowing effluent ponds had triggered a large fish kill along a sixty-five-mile stretch of the Pasion River. Choc was shot the day after the judge overseeing the case ordered the six-month closure of REPSA. The company, at the time, issued a statement rejecting "any link of the company with the murder". Then, in June, it instituted a new anti-violence and intimidation policy, which pledges to "promote safe and secure communities in which we operate". I recently spoke by phone with Baru Bian, a Malaysian politician who was a friend of Bill Kayong, the activist killed in June. Just a few weeks ago, Bian told me, yet another man was killed during a protest at an oil-palm plantation in the town of Mukah. Meanwhile, Kayong's family is still waiting to see if any of the individual charged in Kayong's murder will be convicted. "They are left without their husband and father," Bian told me, "Still waiting for justice to be done." What can we infer from the author's description in the first paragraph?

Many things make people think artists are weird—the odd hours, the nonconformity, the clove cigarettes. However, the weirdest may be this: artists' only jobs are to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel lousy. This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring. In the 20th century, classical music became more atonal, visual art more unsettling. Sure, there have been exceptions, but it would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed his "Ode to Joy". In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite music of his ultra-violent antihero. You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But the reason may actually be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Today the messages that the average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and relentlessly happy. Since these messages have an agenda—to pry our wallets from our pockets—they make the very idea of happiness seem bogus (假的). "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attack. What we forget—what our economy depends on us forgetting—is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us that it is OK not to be happy, that sadness makes happiness deeper. As the wine-connoisseur movie Sideways tells us, it is the kiss of decay and mortality that makes grape juice into Pinot Norway need art to tell us, as religion once did, that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, is a breath of fresh air. What is most strange about artists?

Nicholas Chauvin, a French soldier, aired his veneration of Napoleon Bonaparte so______and unceasingly that he became the laughingstock of all people in Europe.

It was two years ago today that the hunting ban came into force, supposedly ending centuries of tradition. However, the law has been an unmitigated failure—not that either side is shouting about it. It was a nightmare vision that struck fear and loathing into the hearts of millions. When the hunting ban became law, it was said, 16,000 people would lose their jobs, thousands of hounds would be put down, rotting carcasses would litter the countryside, hedgerows would disappear, riders would face on-the-spot fines, law-abiding people from doctors to barristers would be dragged from their horses and carted off to prison, while dog owners would be prosecuted if their mutt caught a rabbit. These were just some of the claims as desperate countryside campaigners battled to save their sport in the lead-up to the hunting ban, which Labour rammed into law using the Parliament Act on November 18, 2004. For many, the fears were real. Others exaggerated as they fought an increasingly aggressive anti-hunting lobby which had rejected acres of independent evidence affirming that hunting is the most humane way of killing foxes. In the battle to "fight prejudice, fight the ban", every emotive argument was deployed. For its part, the anti-hunting brigade extravagantly claimed that the ban would put an end to the rich parading in red jackets. A senior Labour MP, Peter Bradley, admitted in this newspaper that it was, as many suspected, about "class war". He lost his seat shortly afterwards. But people in red coats did not disappear. In fact, none of the forecasts came true. What did happen was something nobody had predicted: the spectacular revival and growth of hunting with hounds. In short, the hunting ban has been a failure. Today, on the second anniversary of the ban's coming into force on February 18, 2005, new figures show that participation in the sport has never been higher. It is so cheerful that two new packs have been formed, something that has not happened for centuries. They include the seductively named Private Pack, set up by the financier Roddy Fleming in Gloucestershire. It operates on an invitation-only basis, a sort of hunting private members club. This can only mean one thing: like it or not, hunting is cool. Young people are taking it up, enticed by the element of rebellion and the mystique of what actually happens as hunts attempt to keep within the law. The hunting ban has been a complete failure because ______.

______ the First World War

Mother was so weak after her operation that the doctors wondered if they would be able to______her through.

The evil manners would be ______ root and branch due to the forceful action taken by the local government.

Visanto Melina, R.D.

In ancient times people who were thought to have the ability to ______ dreams were likely to be highly respected.

A few decades ago

I was ______ in my reading

He's trying to ______ all the support he can obtain for the political party he's formed.

Anyone who trains animals recognizes that human and animal perceptual capacities are different. For most humans, seeing is believing, although we do occasionally brood about whether we can believe our eyes. The other senses are largely ancillary; most of us do not know how we might go about either doubting or believing our noses. But for dogs, scenting is believing. A dog's nose is to ours as the wrinkled surface of our complex brain is to the surface of an egg. A dog who did comparative psychology might easily worry about our consciousness or lack thereof, just as we worry about the consciousness of a squid. We who take sight for granted can draw pictures of scent, but we have no language for doing it the other way about, no way to represent something visually familiar by means of actual scent. Most humans cannot know, with their limited noses, what they can imagine about being deaf, blind, mute, or paralyzed. The sighted can, for example, speak of a blind person as "in the darkness," but there is no corollary expression for what it is that we are in relationship to scent. If we tried to coin words, we might come up with something like "scent-blind." But what would it mean? It couldn't have the sort of meaning that "color-blind" and "tone-deaf" do, because most of us have experienced what "tone" and "color" mean in those expressions, but we don't know what "scent" means in the expression "scent-blind." Scent for many of us can be only a theoretical, technical expression that we use because our grammar requires that we have a noun to go in the sentences we are prompted to utter about animals' tracking. We don't have a sense of scent. What we do have is a sense of smell—for Thanksgiving dinner and skunks and a number of things we call chemicals. So if Fido and I are sitting on the terrace, admiring the view, we inhabit worlds with radically different principles of phenomenology. Say that the wind is to our backs. Our world lies all before us, within a 180 degree angle. The dog's—well, we don't know, do we? He sees roughly the same things that I see but he believes the scents of the garden behind us. He marks the path of the black-and white cat as she moves among the roses in search of the bits of chicken sandwich I let fall as I walked from the house to our picnic spot. I can show em>that/em> Fido is alert to the kitty, but not em>how/em>, for my picture-making modes of thought too easily supply falsifyingly literal representations of the cat and the garden and their modes of being hidden from or revealed to me. The phrase "The other senses are largely ancillary" (Paragraph 1) is used by the author to suggest that ______.

She was artful and could always get round her parents in the end.

There was a ______ of his latest novel in a local newspaper immediately after its publication.

The liberal arts education asks that we confront our unexamined world view with historical understanding, new theories and intercultural ______.

Mobility is one of the characteristics often ______ executives, and they must accustom themselves to moving quite regularly.

There was a noisy ______ at the back of the hall when the speaker began his address.