We will encourage every school to ______ its character, ethos and areas of special interest within a more flexible National Curriculum framework.

Many theories concerning the causes of juvenile delinquency (crimes committed by young people) focus either on the individual or on society as the major contributing influence. Theories 1 on the individual suggest that children engage in criminal behavior 2 they were not sufficiently penalized for previous misdeeds or that they have learned criminal behavior through 3 with others. Theories focusing on the role of society suggest that children commit crimes in 4 to their failure to rise above their socioeconomic status, 5 as a rejection of middle-class values. Most theories of juvenile delinquency have focused on children from disadvantaged families, 6 the fact that children from wealthy homes also commit crimes. The latter may commit crimes 7 lack of adequate parental control. All theories, however, are tentative and are 8 to criticism. Changes in the social structure may indirectly 9 juvenile crime rates. For example, changes in the economy that 10 to fewer job opportunities for youth and rising unemployment 11 make gainful employment increasingly difficult to obtain. The resulting discontent may in 12 lead more youths into criminal behavior. Families have also 13 changes these years. More families consist of one-parent households or two working parents; 14 , children are likely to have less supervision at home 15 was common in the traditional family 16 . This lack of parental supervision is thought to be an influence on juvenile crime rates. Other 17 causes of offensive acts include frustration or failure in school, the increased 18 of drugs and alcohol, and the growing 19 of child abuse and child neglect. All these conditions tend to increase the probability of a child committing a criminal act, 20 a direct causal relationship has not yet been established.

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?

He was ordered away upon a long ______ to the ice-covered south, to make war upon the natives there and rob them of their furs.

Everyone has a moment in history

Nobody noticed the thief slip into the house because the lights happened to ______.

The magician picked out several persons______from the audience and asked them to help him with the performance.

After ______ for the job

John Grisham was born on February 2, 1955

A recent study examined men's attitudes to women

As she has a kindly, outgoing nature

Take this bit of seemingly ______ advice: In order to write quickly, you must first think slowly.

Helplessly she blinked up at him

The goal is to use crops

A person who is truly considerate does thoughtful things for others ______ without having to be asked or reminded.

Most people think of lions as strictly African beasts, but only because they've been killed off almost everywhere else. Ten thousand years ago lions spanned vast sections of the globe. Now lions hold only a small fraction of their former habitat, and Asiatic lions, a subspecies that spit from African lions perhaps 100,000 years ago, hang on to an almost impossibly small slice of their former territory. India is the proud steward of these 300 or so lions, which live primarily in a 560-square-mile sanctuary (保护区). It took me a year and a half to get a permit to explore the entire Gir Forest—and no time at all to see why these lions became symbols of royalty and greatness. A tiger will hide in the forest unseen, but a lion stands its ground, curious and unafraid—lionhearted. Though they told me in subtle ways when I got too close, Gir's lions allowed me unique glimpses into their lives during my three months in the forest. It's odd to think that they are threatened by extinction; Gir has as many lions as it can hold—too many, in fact. With territory in short supply, lions move about near the boundary of the forest and even leave it altogether, often clashing with people. That's one reason India is creating a second sanctuary. There are other pressing reasons: outbreaks of disease or natural disasters. In 1994 a serious disease killed more than a third of Africa's Serengeti lions—a thousand animals—a fate that could easily happen to Gir's cats. These lions are especially vulnerable to disease because they descend from as few as a dozen individuals. "If you do a DNA test, Asiatic lions actually look like identical twins," says Stephen O'Brien, a geneticist (基因学家) who has studied them. Yet the dangers are hidden, and you wouldn't suspect them by watching these lords of the forest. The lions display vitality, and no small measure of charm. Though the gentle intimacy of play vanishes when it's time to eat, meals in Gir are not necessarily frantic affairs. For a mother and her baby lion sharing a deer, or a young male eating an antelope (羚羊). There's no need to fight for a cut of the kill. The animals they hunt for food are generally smaller in Gir than those in Africa, and hunting groups tend to be smaller as well. In the first paragraph, the author tells us that Asiatic lions ______.

The heat in summer is no less______here in this mountain region.

A comet is distinguished from other bodies in the solar system ______.

The Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday that it is trying to track down as many as 386 piglets that may have been genetically engineered and wrongfully sold into the U. S. food supply. The focus of the FDA investigation is pigs raised by researchers at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign. They engineered the animals with two genes: One is a cow gene that increases milk production in the sow. The other, a synthetic gene, makes the milk easier for piglets to digest. The goal was to raise bigger pigs faster. There has been no evidence that either genetically altered plants or animals actually trigger human illness, but critics warn that potential side effects remain unknown. University officials say their tests showed the piglets were not born with the altered genes, but FDA rules require even the offspring of genetically engineered animals to be destroyed so they don' t get into the food supply. The FDA, in a quickly arranged news conference Wednesday prompted by inquiries by USA TODAY, said the University of Illinois will face possible sanctions and fines for selling the piglets to a livestock broker, who in turn sells to processing plants. Both the FDA and the university say the pigs that entered the market do not pose a risk to consumers. But the investigation follows action by the U. S. Department of Agriculture in December to fine a Texas company that contaminated 500, 000 bushels of soybeans with com that had been genetically altered to produce a vaccine for pigs. Critics see such cases as evidence of the need for more government oversight of a burgeoning area of scientific research. "This is a small incident, but it's incident like this that could destroy consumer confidence and export confidence," says Stephanie Childs of the Grocery Manufacturers of America. "We already have Europe shaky on biotech. The countries to whom we export are going to look at this." The University of Illinois says it tested the DNA of every piglet eight times to make sure that the animal hadn't inherited the genetic engineering of its mother. Those piglets that did were put back into the study. Those that didn't were sold to the pig broker. "Any pig who' s tested negative for the genes since 1999 has been sent off to market," says Charles Zukoski, vice chancellor for research. But FDA deputy commissioner Lester Crawford says that under the terms of the university's agreement with the FDA, the researchers were forbidden to remove the piglets without FDA approval. "The University of Illinois failed to check with FDA to see whether or not the animals could be sold on the open market. And they were not to be used under any circumstance for food." The FDA is responsible for regulating and overseeing transgenic animals because such genetic manipulation is considered an unapproved animal drug. The 386 piglets wrongfully sold into food supply are from ______.

The child was so ingenuous that even when she knocked the television off its stand so that it was irreparably damaged, her parents thought her to be charming.