What had begun as good-natured teasing quickly gave way to ______ as the lost hikers blamed one another for their predicament.
Once upon a time
He offered her a trip to Australia but she______him______flat.
The key to the popularity of aluminum is its incredible ______.
There was nothing we could do______wait.
Next week you'd better bring all your questions here. We're going to have a question-and-answer______.
______ of the Pennsylvania Gazette
From the moment of his birth the ______ into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.
Some people think it's______to smoke with a cigarette holder.
She complained that the treatment she received in the hospital had completely ______ her of her dignity.
It goes without saying that people who refuse to ______ with the law will be punished.
As the society has rigid social ______
The vision of that big black car hitting the sidewalk a few feet from us will never be ______ from my memory.
As the global village continues to shrink and cultures collide, it is essential for all of us to become more sensitive, more aware of, and more observant to the body language (motions/gestures) that surround us each day. And as many of us cross over cultural borders, it would be fitting for us to respect, learn, and understand more about the effective and powerful "silent language" of gestures. Without gestures, our world would be static and colorless. The social anthropologist, Edward T. Hall claims 60 percent of all our communication is nonverbal. In that case, bow can we possibly communicate with one another without gestures? The world is a giddy montage (蒙太奇) of vivid gestures—the ones used by traffic police, street vendors, expressway drivers, teachers, children on playground and athletes with their exuberant (热情洋溢的) hugging, clenched fists and "high fives". People all over the world use their hands, heads, and bodies to communicate expressively. Gestures and body language communicate as effectively as words—maybe even more effectively. We use gestures daily, almost instinctively, from beckoning to a waiter, or punctuating a business presentation with visual signals to airport ground attendants guiding an airline pilot into the jet-way or a parent using a whole dictionary of gestures to teach a child. Gestures are woven into our social lives. The "vocabulary" of gestures can be at once informative and entertaining...but also dangerous. Gestures can be menacing, warm, instructive, or even sensuous. Bear in mind that some gestures are in general use, but there may always be exceptions. In recent years, Western and contemporary values and ideas have become more popular and have either influenced, altered, and even replaced some of the more traditional gestures. Understanding human behavior is tricky stuff. No two people behave in precisely the same way. Nor do people from the same culture all perform exactly the same gestures and body language uniformly. For almost any gestures there will probably be a minority within a given nationality who might say, "Well, some might attach that meaning to it, but to me it means..." and then they will provide a different interpretation. In the world of gestures, the best single piece of advice is to remember the two A's—"ask" and be "aware". If you see a motion or gesture that is new or confusing, ask a local person what it signifies. Then, be aware of the many body signs and customs around you. What is the main purpose of the first paragraph?
Speech is so familiar a feature of daily life that we rarely pause to define it. It seems as natural to man as walking and only less so than breathing. Yet it needs but a moment's reflection to convince us that this naturalness of speech is but an illusory feeling. The process of acquiring speech is, in sober fact, an utterly different sort of thing from the process of learning to walk. In the case of the latter function, culture, in other words, the traditional body of social usage, is not seriously brought into play. The child is individually equipped, by the complex set of factors that we term biological heredity, to make all the needed muscular and nervous adjustments that result in walking. Indeed, the very conformation of these muscles and of the appropriate parts of the nervous system may be said to be primarily adapted to the movements made in walking and in similar activities. In a very real sense, the normal human being is predestined to walk, not because his elders will assist him to learn the art, but because his organism is prepared from birth, or even from the moment of conception, to take on all those expenditures of nervous energy and all those muscular adaptations that result in walking. To put it concisely, walking is an inherent, biological function of man. Not so language. It is of course true that in a certain sense the individual is predestined to talk, but that is due entirely to the circumstance that he is born not merely in nature, but in the lap of a society that is certain, reasonably certain, to lead him to its traditions. Eliminate society and there is every reason to believe that he will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives at all. But it is just as certain that he will never learn to talk, that is, to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society. Or, again, remove the new-born individual from the social environment into which he has come and transplant him to an utterly alien one. He will develop the art of walking in his new environment very much as he would have developed it in the old. But his speech will be completely at variance with the speech of his native environment. Walking then is a general human activity that varies only within a restricted limit as we pass from individual to individual. Its variability is purposeless. Speech is a human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social group to social group, because it is a purely historical heritage, the product of long-continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies—not as consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples. Walking is an organic, instinctive function, speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, "cultural" function. The first sentence of Paragraph Two, "Not so language" is the closest in meaning to ______.
Some pundits ______ that many computers are obsolete before they're even designed, which goes a long way toward explaining why the ATM at my grocery store never works.
The music aroused an ______ feeling of homesickness in him.
Directions: em>You are asked to write a composition in no less than 150 words according to the
In some countries where racial prejudice is acute, violence has so come to be taken for granted as a means of solving differences, that it is not even questioned. There are countries where the white man imposes his rule by brute force, there are countries where the black man protests by setting fire to cities and by looting and pillaging. Important people on both side who would in other respects appear to be reasonable men, get up and calmly argue in favor of violence—as if it were a legitimate solution, like any other, what is really frightening, what really fills you with despair, is the realization that when it comes to the crunch, we have made no actual progress at all. We may wear collars and ties instead of war-paint, but our instincts remain basically unchanged. The whole of the recorded history of the human race, that tedious documentation of violence, has taught us absolutely nothing. We have still not learnt that violence never solves a problem but makes it more acute. The sheer horror, the bloodshed and the suffering mean nothing. No solution ever comes to light the morning after when we dismally contemplate the smoking ruins and wonder what hit us. The truly reasonable men who know where the solutions lie are finding it harder and harder to get a hearing. They are despised, mistrusted and even persecuted by their own kind because they advocate such apparently outrageous things as law enforcement. If half the energy that goes into violent acts were put to good use, if our efforts were directed at cleaning up the slums and ghettos, at improving living-standards and providing education and employment for all, we would have gone a long way to arriving at a solution. Our strength is undermined by having to mop up the mess that violence leaves in its wake. In a well-directed effort, it would not be impossible to fulfill the ideals of a stable social program. The benefits that can be derived from constructive solutions are everywhere apparent in the world around us. Genuine and lasting solutions are always possible, providing we work within the framework of the law. Before we can even begin to contemplate peaceful co-existence between the races, we must appreciate each other's problems. And to do this, we must learn about them: it is a simple exercise in communication, in exchanging information. "Talk, talk, talk," the advocates of violence say, "all you ever do is talk, and we are none the wiser." It's rather like the story of the famous barrister who painstakingly explained his case to the judge. After listening to a lengthy argument the judge complained that after all this talk, he was none the wiser. "Possible, my lord," the barrister replied, "none the wiser, but surely far better informed." Knowledge is the necessary prerequisite to wisdom; the knowledge that violence creates the evils it pretends to solve. Which can best replace the word "acute" (Para. 1)?
The history of responses to the work of the artist Sandro Botticelli (1444—1510) suggests that widespread appreciation by critics is a relatively recent phenomenon. Writing in 1550, Vasari expressed an unease with Botticelli's work, admitting that the artist fitted awkwardly into his evolutionary scheme of the history of art. Over the next two centuries, academic art historians defamed Botticelli in favor of his fellow Florentine, Michelangelo. Even when anti-academic art historians of the early nineteenth century rejected many of the standards of evaluation adopted by their predecessors, Botticelli's work remained outside of accepted taste, pleasing neither amateur observers nor connoisseurs. (Many of his best paintings, however, remained hidden away in obscure churches and private homes.) The primary reason for Botticelli's unpopularity is not difficult to understand: most observers, up until the mid-nineteenth century, did not consider him to be noteworthy, because his work, for the most part, did not seem to these observers to exhibit the traditional characteristics of fifteenth-century Florentine art. For example, Botticelli rarely employed the technique of strict perspective and, unlike Michelangelo, never used chiaroscuro. Another reason for Botticelli's unpopularity may have been that his attitude toward the style of classical art was very different from that of his contemporaries. Although he was thoroughly exposed to classical art, he showed little interest in borrowing from the classical style. Indeed, it is paradoxical that a painter of large-scale classical subjects adopted a style that was only slightly similar to that of classical art. In any case, when viewers began to examine more closely the relationship of Botticelli's work to the tradition of fifteenth-century Florentine art, his reputation began to grow. Analyses and assessments of Botticelli made between 1850 and 1870 by the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, as well as by the writer Pater (although he, unfortunately, based his assessment on an incorrect analysis of Botticelli's personality), inspired a new appreciation of Botticelli throughout the English-speaking world. Yet Botticelli's work, especially the Sistine frescoes, did not generate worldwide attention until it was finally subjected to a comprehensive and scrupulous analysis by Home in 1908. Home rightly demonstrated that the frescoes shared important features with paintings by other fifteenth-century Florentines—features such as skillful representation of anatomical proportions, and of the human figure in motion. However, Home argued that Botticelli did not treat these qualities as ends in themselves—rather, that he emphasized clear depletion of a story, a unique achievement and one that made the traditional Florentine qualities less central. Because of Home's emphasis crucial to any study of art, the twentieth century has come to appreciate Botticelli's achievements. Which of the following would be the best title for the text?