Should we care if over 150 known species of animals have【C1】______from the earth in the last fifty years? Should we be concerned that there are【C2】______thousands of species whose very existence is【C3】______endangered—largely because of our activities?【C4】______, after all, is the natural end of populations. Species are born, then【C5】______, and then die. Some live a【C6】______time, perhaps millions of years; some die more quickly. We have【C7】______the extinction of many species we know about, and we have undoubtedly sealed the【C8】______of others. In fact, there are undoubtedly many other species that have lived among us during our time on earth, but that have disappeared as a(n)【C9】______of our activities without our ever having known they existed. It is hard to explain the rationale of many of us who are concerned about such matters. I have never seen a sea whale,【C10】______I don't want them to become extinct. Moreover, I felt this way long before I understood anything about how they might be an important part of an ecosystem. Possibly such feelings merely reflect the cultural attitude that it is ""nice"" to wish other living things well; thus, the attitude is【C11】______.I feel nice. There are, of course, more rational reasons for【C12】______the extermination of any species. For one thing, the kind of attitude that encourages or sanctions the destruction of other species is a threat【C13】______our own wellbeing. If such an attitude exists, we ourselves might【C14】______victim to it. Living things(including us)might be expected to fare better where there is【C15】______for life. The extinction of other species could also threaten us【C16】______by simplifying the system of which we are a part or by destroying parts of the ecosystem【C17】______which we directly rely. For example, if we continue to poison the oceans【C18】______we are willing to believe only a few bottom dwellers are affected, we might【C19】______overstep some critical threshold and trigger the wholesale death of plankton, thus finding ourselves without a major【C20】______of the world's food and with our oxygen supplies dwindling."

On the table was a vase filled with artificial flowers.

It's becoming something of a joke along the Maine-Canada border. So many busloads of retired people crisscross the line looking for affordable drugs that the roadside stands should advertise, "Lobsters. Blueberries. Lipitor. Coumalin." Except, of course, that such a market in prescription drugs would be illegal. These senior long-distance shopping sprees fall in a legal gray zone. But as long as people cross the border with prescriptions from a physician and have them filled for no more than a three-month supply for personal use, customs and other federal officials leave them alone. The trip might be tiring, but people can save an average of 60 percent on the cost of their prescription drugs. For some, that's the difference between taking the drugs or doing without. "The last bus trip I was on six months ago had 25 seniors," says Chellie Pingree, former Maine state senator and now president of Common Cause. "Those 25 people saved $19,000 on their supplies of drugs." Pingree sponsored Maine RX, which authorizes a discounted price on drugs for Maine residents who lack insurance coverage. The law was challenged by drug companies but recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. It hasn't yet taken effect. Figuring out ways to spend less on prescription drugs has become a multifaceted national movement of consumers, largely senior citizens. The prescription drug bill in America is $160 billion annually, and people over 65 fill five times as many prescriptions as working Americans on average. "But they do it on health benefits that are half as good and on incomes that are half as large," says Richard Evans, senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, an investment research finn. What's more, seniors account for 20 percent of the voting public. It's little wonder that the May 19 Supreme Court ruling got the attention of drug manufacturers and politicians across the country. The often-over-looked state of 1.3 million tucked in the northeast corner of the country became David to the pharmaceutical industry's Goliath. The face-off began three years ago when state legislators like Pingree began questioning why Maine's elderly population had to take all those bus trips. The elderly Americans cross the Maine-Canada border in order to get drugs that are ______.

As there was no road

Some people viewed the findings with caution

Later the Greeks moved east from Cumae to Neapolis, the New City, a little farther along the coast where modern Naples now stands. We have a very good idea what life in this sun-splashed land was like during the Roman era because of the recovered splendor of Pompeii and Herculaneum. But as the well-trod earth of Campania continues to yield ancient secrets, Mastrolorenzo and Petrone, with their colleague Lucia Pappalardo, have put together a rich view of an earlier time and what may have been humankind's first encounter with the primal force of Vesuvius. Almost all has come to light by chance. In May 2001, for example, construction workers began digging the foundation for a supermarket next to a desolate, weed-strewn intersection just outside the town of Nola. An archaeologist working for the province of Naples noticed several trances of burned wood a few feet below the surface, an indication of earlier human habitation. At 19 feet below, relicts of a perfectly preserved Early Bronze Age village began to emerge. Over the next several months, the excavation unearthed three large prehistoric dwellings: horseshoe shaped huts with clearly demarked entrances, living areas, and the equivalent of kitchens. Researchers found dozens of pots, pottery plates, and crude hourglass-shaped canisters that still contained fossilized traces of almonds, flour, grain, acorns, olive-pits, even mushrooms. Simple partitions separated the rooms; one hut had what appeared to be a loft. The tracks of goats, sheep, cattle, and pigs, as well as their human masters, crisscrossed the yard outside. The skeletons of nine pregnant goats lay in an enclosed area that included an animal pen. If a skeleton can be said to cower, the bones of an apparently terrified dog huddled under the eaves of one roof. What preserved this prehistoric village, what formed a perfect impression of its quotidian contents right down to leaves in the thatch roofs and cereal grains in the kitchen containers, was the fallout and surge and mud from the Avellino eruption of Vesuvius. Claude Albore Livadie, a French archaeologist who published the initial report on the Nola discovery, dubbed it "a first Pompeii". During May and June 2001, provincial archaeological authorities oversaw excavation of the site Mastrolorenzo hurried out to Nola, about 18 miles east of Naples. He and Pappalardo took samples of the ash and volcanic deposits, which contained chemical clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But then the scientific story veered off into the familiar opera buffa of Italian archaeology. The owner of the site agitated for construction of the supermarket to resume or to be compensated for the delay—not an unusual dilemma in a country where the backhoes and bulldozers of a modern economy clang against the ubiquitous remains of ancient civilizations. Government archaeologists hastily excavated the site and removed the objects. As it turns out, the supermarket was never built, and all that remains of a site that miraculously captured one of civilization's earliest encounters with volcanic destruction is a hole in the ground on a vacant, weed- choked lot, the foundation walls of the huts barely visible. A small, weathered sign proclaiming the "Pompeii of Prehistory" hangs limply from a padlocked gate. Despite the loss of Nola as well as some other archaeological sites, Mastrolorenzo, Petrone, Pappalardo, and American volcanologist Michael Sheridan triggered worldwide fascination when they summarized these findings in the spring of 2006 in the em>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences/em> (PNAS). But their research went beyond mere archaeological documentation. The Avellino event, they wrote, "caused a social-demographic collapse and abandonment of the entire area for centuries." The new findings, along with computer models, show that an Avellino-size eruption would unleash a concentric wave of destruction that could devastate Naples and much of its surroundings. In the world before Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami, these warnings might have sounded as remote and transitory as those prehistoric footsteps. Not anymore. The site of Nola was compared to Pompeii because ______.

No president who performs his duties faithfully and ______ can have any leisure.

You shouldn't go to work today

Every person on the sales team is______because they work together well.

I have to say this

What he told me was a ______ of downright lies.

How would you rank "important" languages

Traditionally

If you want to know the train schedule

A visitor to a museum today would notice ______ changes in the way museums are operated.

The Prime Minister handled the crisis calmly and dispassionately, thereby enhancing his reputation for being ______.

Directions: em>There are many reasons for a person planning to do PhD research (for example

When I picked up the phone

It is said that in England death is pressing

The manager gave her his______that the complaint would be investigated.