There ought to be less anxiety over the perceived risk of mountain climbing than ______ in the public mind today.

The way that people spend their money, and the objects on which they spend it, are the last areas where free choice and individuality can be expressed. The choice reflects personal taste, the way people see themselves and the fantasies they【C1】______about their lives, the restrictions on money available【C2】______them, the presence of others in the family with a【C3】______on that money, and the influence of current convention,【C4】______, surroundings and locality. Shopping is an important human activity. Yet shoppers are【C5】______with a confusing situation and a(n)【C6】______changing one. The confusion arises from the claims【C7】______advertising, from inadequate information about new products, new materials, new places to shop—a confusion enhanced by rising prices and a(n)【C8】______choice of goods than ever before. The search【C9】______the right purchase is based on ignorance of【C10】______own needs and ignorance of the product's【C11】______for those needs. When choosing any particular item, there are several lines of communication which might provide some guidance.【C12】______none of these is entirely satisfactory. For example, you can ask a shop assistant initially.【C13】______you find one, she may quite【C14】______not know the answers. She may be a schoolgirl with a Saturday job, or a housewife【C15】______part-time.

Strikes and strikebreaking

I've never______the theory that people are more important than animals.

The cradle of oversea traffic and of the art of naval combats, the Mediterranean, the common ______ of all mankind, makes a tender appeal to a seaman.

During an international crisis, many______messages will generally emanate from the president's office.

It will be safer to walk the streets because people will not need to carry large amounts of cash. Virtually all financial______will be conducted by computer.

When traveling

The poor old woman can't ______ her hot water bottle.

Whenever a big company______a small one, the product almost always gets worse.

Recently a number of cases have been reported of young children______a violent act previously seen on television.

A rapid portfolio turnover rate may preclude low long-term capital gains.

Since a circle has no beginning or end

Countries within the European Community grant certain commercial______to each other.

We have at present not any______of the furniture as you required.

The hurricane brought a huge damage to the coastal village: fishing boats were ______ and many houses collapsed.

Most scholars agree that Isaac Newton

One of the most authoritative voices speaking to us today is of course the voice of the advertisers. Its strident clamour dominates our lives. It shouts at us from the television screen and the radio loudspeakers; waves to us from every page of the newspaper; plucks at our sleeves on the escalator; signals to us from the roadside billboards all day and flashes messages to us in coloured lights all night. It has forced on us a whole new conception of the successful man as a man no less than 20% of whose mail consists of announcements of giant carpet sales. Advertising has been among England's biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrable achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure? Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer-appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they have finished it, by pretending that it confers status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover. Other manufacturers find advertising saves them changing their product. And manufacturers hate change. The ideal product is one which goes on unchanged for ever. If, therefore, for one reason or another, some alteration seems called for—how much better to change the image, the packet or pile pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself. The advertising man has to combine the qualities of the three most authoritative professions: Church, Bar and Medicine. The great skill required of our priests, most highly developed in missionaries but present, indeed mandatory, in all, is the skill of getting people to believe in and contribute money to something which can never be logically proved. At the Bar, an essential ability is that of presenting the most persuasive case you can to a jury of ordinary people, with emotional appeals masquerading as logical exposition; a case you do not necessarily have to believe in yourself, just one you have studiously avoided discovering to be false. As for medicine, any doctor will confirm that a large part of his job is not clinical treatment but faith healing. His apparently scientific approach enables his patients to believe that he knows exactly what is wrong with them and exactly what they need to put the right, just as advertising does—"Run down? You need..." "No one will dance with you? A dab of... will make you popular." Advertising man use statistics rather like a drunk uses a lamp-post for support rater than illumination. They will dress anyone up in a white coat to appear like an em>unimpeachable/em> authority or, failing that, they will even be happy with the announcement, "As used by 90% of the actors who play doctors on television." Their engaging quality is that they enjoy having their latest ruses uncovered almost as much as anyone else. According to the passage, modern advertising is "authoritative" because of the way it ______.

Cohesion has been found to ______ positively with group productivity and member satisfaction.

What is the topic of the passage?