Receptionist: Front desk. Can I help you? Hotel guest: This is Mr. Burton in 120______? Receptionist: Of course. What time?

The fear of Americanization of the planet is more ideological paranoia(多疑) than reality. There is no doubt that, with globalization, English has become the general language of our time, as was Latin in the Middle Ages. And it will continue its ascent, since it is an indispensable instrument for international transactions and communication. But does this mean that English necessarily develops at the expense of the other great languages? Absolutely not. In fact, the opposite is true. The vanishing of borders and an increasingly interdependent world have created incentives for new generations to learn and assimilate other cultures, not merely as a hobby, but also out of necessity, because the ability to speak several languages and navigate comfortably in different cultures has become crucial for professional success. Consider the case of Spanish. Half a century ago, Spanish speakers were an inward-looking community; we projected ourselves in only very limited ways beyond our traditional linguistic confines. Today, Spanish is dynamic and thriving, gaining beachheads or even vast landholdings on all five continents. That there are between 25 and 30 million Spanish speakers in the United States today explains why the two recent U.S. presidential candidates—the Texas governor George W. Bush and the vice-president Al Gore—campaigned not only in English, but also in Spanish. How many millions of young men and women around the globe have responded to the challenges of globalization by learning Japanese, German, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian or French? Fortunately, this tendency will only increase in the coming years. That is why the best defence of our own cultures and languages is to promote them vigorously throughout this new world, not to persist in the naive pretense of vaccinating them against the menace of English. Those who propose such remedies speak much about culture, but they tend to be ignorant people who mask their true vocation: nationalism. And if there is anything at odds with the universalist propensities of culture, it is the exclusionary vision that nationalist perspectives try to impose on cultural life. The most admirable lesson that cultures teach us is that they need not be protected by bureaucrats or commissars, or confined behind iron bars, or isolated by customs services, in order to remain alive and exuberant; to the contrary, such efforts would only wither or even trivialize culture. Cultures must live freely, constantly jousting with different cultures. This renovates and renews them, allowing them to evolve and adapt to the continuous flow of life. In antiquity, Latin did not kill Greek; to the contrary, the artistic originality and intellectual depth of Hellenic culture permeated Roman civilization and, through it, the poems of Homer and the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle reached the entire world. Globalization will not make local cultures disappear; in a framework of worldwide openness, all that is valuable and worthy of survival in local cultures will find fertile ground in which to bloom.

Stewardess: Please put your seat up. We"ll be serving dinner shortly. Passenger: I"d like to, but there seems to be something wrong with it. ______

When we arrived at the airport, we were told our flight ______.

The Xinhua bookstore chain, China"s largest official publishing enterprise, has become a surprising flash point for interest among foreign venture capital investors. "We are actively promoting the process of shareholding reform. Every day, we receive lots of offers from domestic and foreign investors interested in getting involved and may pick one or two to do so in the next two to three months," Zhang Yashan, the leading cadre of the head store"s office said. According to a company insider who requested anonymity, several securities firms are overseeing Xinhua bookstore"s reform and the company could list on the domestic stock market once reforms are repotted to the government in May and then completed. The source would not reveal the specific names of the firms involved or details of the reform. "We will stipulate that we must remain the majority shareholder, but we will welcome all kinds of investment, including foreign capital, to establish a shareholding enterprise. We hope the No. 2 shareholder will be a foreign enterprise," the source said. In keeping with its World Trade Organization entry promises, China must allow foreign investment in domestic publication retailers by the end of this year.

With regarding to this model of color TV sets, the home-made ones are by no means those made in Japan.

After criminals were caught, they were accused and put on ______.

______pollution control measures tend to be money consuming, many industries hesitate to adopt them.

Interviewer: Let me see if I understood you. You mean that you can work extra hours if needed, right? Interviewee: ______

My parents" house had an attic, the darkest and strangest part of the building, reachable only by placing a stepladder beneath the trapdoor, and filled with unidentifiable articles too important to be thrown out with the trash but no longer suitable to have at hand. This mysterious space was the memory of the place. After many years all the things deposited in it became, one by one, lost to consciousness. But they were still there, we knew, safely and comfortably stored in the tissues of the house. These days most of us live in smaller, more modem houses or in apartments, and attics have vanished. Even the deep closets in which we used to pile things up for temporary forgetting are rarely designed into new homes. Everything now is out in the open, openly acknowledged and displayed, and whenever we grow tired of a memory, an old chair, a trunkful of old letters, they are cast into the dump for burning. This has seemed a healthier way to live, except maybe for the smoke everything out to be looked at, nothing strange hidden under the roof, nothing forgotten because of no place left in impenetrable darkness to forget. Openness is the new lifestyle, no undisclosed belongings, no private secrets. Candor is the role in architecture. The house is a machine for living, and what kind of machine would hide away its worn-out, deserted parts? But it is in our nature as human beings to clutter, and we long for places set aside, reserved for storage. We tend to accumulate and outgrow possessions at the same time, and it is an endlessly discomforting mental task to keep sorting out the ones to get rid of. We might, we think, remember them later and find a use for then, and if they are gone for good, off to the damp, this is a source of nervousness. I think it may be one of the reasons we drum our fingers so much these days. We might take a lesson here from what has been learned about our brains in this century. We thought we discovered, first off, the attic, although its existence has been mentioned from time to time by all the people we used to call great writers. What we really found was the trapdoor and a stepladder, and off we clambered, shining flashlights into the comers, vacuuming the dust out of bureau drawers, puzzling over the names of objects, tossing them down to the floor below, and finally paying around fifty dollars an hour to have them cast away for burning.

The beat generation mainly referred to the youth who were born and brought up around the Second World War. They showed their disdain(蔑视，轻视) for almost everything traditional, such as government authority, respect for parents, one"s duty, moral standards, and traditional customs. They developed a kind of absolute individualism and liberty. They preferred long hair, mini dresses or close fitting clothes to show off the figure. They advocated freedom of sex and cohabitation(同居). Their influence could be seen from the fact that about one third of the American couples living together were not married by law. And the divorce rate was very high. The endless US wars abroad and sharp class straggle at home caused many American youths to develop a kind of cynicism. They doubted the existing social system, possibility of harmonious(和谐的) human relations, and the long honored standard for correct behavior. They felt society overlooked their needs. Therefore, they refused to do any duty that was required of them by society. They declared "Don"t believe anyone over thirty". All this came from the sick society. It"s wrong to imagine they all fought against capitalism in support of revolutionary things. Some of their ideas were even more decadent(颓废的) and impractical. It was an abnormal phenomenon in an abnormal society.

Most episodes of absent-mindedness—forgetting where you left something or wondering why you just entered a room—are caused by a simple lack of attention, says Schacter. "You"re supposed to remember something, but you haven"t encoded it deeply". Encoding, Schacter explains, is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major impact on recalling it later. Failure to encode properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket, for example, and don"t pay attention to what you did because you"re involved in a conversation, you"ll probably forget that the phone is in the jacket now hanging in your wardrobe(衣柜). "Your memory itself isn"t failing you", says Schacter. "Rather, you didn"t give your memory system the information it needed". Lack of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. "A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago", says Zelinski, "may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox". Women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment, and memory relies on just that. Visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness, says Schacter. "But be sure the cue is clear and available", he cautions. If you want to remember to take a medication(药物) with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table—don"t leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket. Another common episode of absent-mindedness, walking into a room and wondering why you"re there. Most likely, you were thinking about something else. "Everyone does this from time to time" says Zelinski. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room and you"ll likely remember.

You______engage in serious debate or discussion unless you are willing to endure attacks.

Shop-assistant: Can I help you? Customer: Yes, I"d like to try these shoes in size 4, please? Shop-assistant: Yes, just a moment...I"m sorry but we"ve only got them in four and a half. ______?

A: I like this apartment very much, but I"ll come back this evening with my wife and kids. Will that be convenient? B: ______

The United States has historically higher rates of marriage than those of other industrialized countries. The current annual marriage【B1】in the United States—about 9 new marriages for every 1,000 people—is substantially higher than it is in other industrialized countries. However, marriage is【B2】as widespread as it was several decades ago. The proportion of American adults who are married【B3】from 72 percent in 1970 to 60 percent in 2002. This does not mean that large numbers of people will remain unmarried【B4】their lives. Throughout the 20th century, about 90 percent of Americans married at some point in their lives. Experts【B5】that about the same proportion of today"s young adults will eventually marry. The timing of marriage has varied【B6】over the past century. In 1995 the average age of women in the United States at the time of their first marriage was 25. The average age of men was about 27. Men and women in the United States marry for the first time at an average of five years later than people did in the 1950s.【B7】, young adults of the 1950s married younger than did any previous【B8】in U.S. history. Today"s later age of marriage is in line with the age of marriage between 1890 and 1940. Moreover, a greater proportion of the population was married (95 percent) during the 1950s than at any time before【B9】. Experts do not agree on why the "marriage rush" of the late 1940s and 1950s occurred, but most social scientists believe it represented a【B10】to the return of peaceful life and prosperity after 15 years of severe economic depression and war.

He added that the state government has made ______ arrangements for the conference.

Although the United States cherishes the tradition that it is a nation of small towns and wide open spaces, only one in every eight Americans now lives on a farm. The【B1】population trend has been a double one, toward both urbanization and suburbanization, Metropolitan areas have grown explosively in the past decade and nearly half this increase has been in the【B2】, With the rapid growth of cities has come【B3】rapid decentralization. The flight of Americans from the central city to the suburbs【B4】one of the greatest migrations of modern times; quiet residential sections outside cities have become conglomerations of streets, split-level houses, and shopping centers. 【B5】, this spurt of suburban expansion does not alter the basic fact that the United States【B6】one of the most urban nations on the face of the earth. Census Bureau【B7】show that the【B8】population has been shrinking steadily since 1880. When the United States became a nation it had no large cities at all; today【B9】fifty cities have populations of more than 258,000. Mammoth complexes of cities are developing in the area of the East Coast and the east north central states, on the pacific and Gulf coasts, and near the shores of the Great Lakes. Some sociologists now regard the entire 600-mile stretch between Boston and Washington, D.C.—an area holding a fifth of the country"s population—【B10】one vast city or, as they call it, megalopolis.

Many people think there is no need to take special care over home security. "I"m all right, I"m insured". Maybe if you"re fully insured. Even then you can never recover the real value you place upon your possessions. But you can"t insure against the upset and unhappiness that we all feel if our homes are seriously damaged by some stranger, our windows and doors smashed, our precious possessions ruined. "It won"t happen to me". Won"t it? A home is broken into almost every minute of the day. Thefts of all kinds, including cars and property stolen, happen twice as frequently. "I"ve nothing worth stealing". You may think not. But in fact every one has something worth a thief"s attention. And we all have things of special value to us even if they"re worth little or nothing in cash terms. "I"m only a tenant here". The thief doesn"t care whether you"re a tenant or an owner-occupier. You"re just as likely to be robbed. Have a word with the owner of the house ff you think extra locks and fastenings are necessary. "They"ll get in any way". Most thieves are always looking for easy jobs. They are soon discouraged by houses they can"t get into quickly and easily. So it"s worth taking care. This booklet will help you. It"s based on the practical experience of police forces throughout the country. Most of the suggestions will cost you only a few minutes extra time and thought. A few may involve some expense, but this is small compared with the loss and unhappiness you might otherwise suffer. If you are in doubt, ask for free advice from the Crime Prevention Officer at your local police station.

Man: How long does the journey take if I go by bus? Woman: ______. I think the Airport Express is your best bet. Man: Many thanks.