Many paintings of the American Southwest convey a feeling of isolation and loneliness that mirrors the ______ landscape they depict.

Because all the parts of this machine are ______

原子内部超过99%的空间空无一物。若将这些空间全压缩掉，那么全球人类可以被塞进一粒方糖。

Monkeys are excellent climbers, and most are______tree dwellers.

The hunter knows quite well that wild animals go seeking their ______ in the jungle after dark.

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 our 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 US society may lie in ______.

The newspaper did not mention the______of the damage caused by the fire.

John glanced at Mary to see what she thought

Most people

In the eyes of many ordinary people

Directions: em>Write an essay (200-300 words)

I bought an alarm clock with a (n) ______ dial which can be seen clearly in the dark.

The relationship between technology and development is complicated. At times the negative features of technology seem to______the positive ones.

Before high school teacher Kimberly Rugh got down to business at the start of a recent school week, she joked with her students about how she'd had to clean cake out of the corners of her house after her 2-year-old son's birthday party. This friendly combination of chitchat took place not in front of a blackboard but in an E-mail message that Rugh sent to the 145 students she's teaching at the Florida Virtual School, one of the nation's leading online high schools. The school's motto is "any time, any place, any path, any pace". Florida's E-school attracts many students who need flexible scheduling, from young tennis stars and young musicians to brothers Tobias and Tyler Heeb, who take turns working on the computer while helping out with their family's clam-farming business on Pine Island, off Florida's southwest coast. Home-schoolers also are well represented. Most students live in Florida, but 55 hail from West Virginia, where a severe teacher shortage makes it hard for many students to take advanced classes. Seven kids from Texas and four from Shanghai round out the student body. The great majority of Florida Virtual Schoolers—80 percent are enrolled in regular Florida public or private high schools. Some are busy overachievers. Others are retaking classes they barely passed the first time. The school's biggest challenge is making sure that students aren't left to sink or swim on their own. After the school experienced a disappointing course completion rate of just 50 percent in its early years, Executive Director Julie Young made a priority out of what she calls "relationship-building," asking teachers to stay in frequent E-mail and phone contact with their students. That personal touch has helped: The completion rate is now 80 percent. Critics of online classes say that while they may have a limited place, they are a poor substitute for the face-to-face contact and socialization that take place in brick-and-mortar classrooms. Despite opportunities for online chats, some virtual students say they'd prefer to have more interaction with their peers. Students and parents are quick to acknowledge that virtual schooling isn't for everyone. "If your child's not focused and motivated, I can only imagine it would be a nightmare," says Patricia Haygood of Orlando, whose two daughters are thriving at the Florida school. For those who have what it takes, however, virtual learning fills an important niche. "I can work at my own pace, on my own time," says Hackney. "It's the ultimate in student responsibility." Kimberly Rugh Talked about her son's birthday party ______.

The scientist ______ his great energy and endurance to his habit of dozing off whenever he wanted.

When cooperating with the American specialists in the States, I ______ myself of the opportunity to improve my English.

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.