Lousia may Alcott' s novel Little Women, which recounts the experiences of the four march sisters during the American civil war, is largely autobiographical.

Pop stars today enjoy a style of living which was once the prerogative only of Royalty. Wherever they go, people turn out in their thousands to greet them. The crowds go wild trying to catch a brief glimpse of their smiling, colorfully dressed idols. The stars are transported in their chauffeur driven Rolls-Royces, private helicopters or executive aeroplanes. They are surrounded by a permanent entourage of managers, press agents and bodyguards. Photographs of them appear regularly in the press and all their comings and goings are reported, for, like Royalty, pop stars are news. If they enjoy many of the privileges of Royalty, they certainly share many of the inconveniences as well. It is dangerous for them to make unscheduled appearances in public. They must be constantly shielded from the adoring crowds which idolize them. They are no longer private individuals, but public property. The financial rewards they receive for this sacrifice cannot be calculated, for their rates of pay are astronomical. And why not? Society has always rewarded its top entertainers lavishly. The great days of Hollywood have become legendary: famous stars enjoyed fame, wealth and adulation on an unprecedented scale. By today's standards, the excesses of Hollywood do not seem quite so spectacular. A single gramophone record nowadays may earn much more in royalties than the films of the past ever did. The competition for the title 'Top of the Pops' is fierce, but the rewards are truly colossal. It is only right that the stars should be paid in this way. Don't the top men in industry earn enormous salaries for the services they perform to their companies and their countries? Pop stars earn vast sums in foreign currency—often more than large industrial concerns—and the taxman can only be grateful fro their massive annual contributions to the exchequer. So who would begrudge them their rewards? It's all very well for people in humdrum jobs to moan about the successes and rewards of others. People who make envious remarks should remember that the most famous stars represent only the tip of the iceberg. For every famous star, there are hundreds of others struggling to earn a living. A man working in a steady job and looking forward to a pension at the end of it has no right to expect very high rewards. He has chosen security and peace of mind, so there will always be a limit to what he can earn. But a man who attempts to become a star is taking enormous risks. He knows at the outset that only a handful of competitors ever get to the very top. He knows that years of concentrated effort may be rewarded with complete failure. But he knows, too, that the rewards for success are very high indeed: they are the recompense for the huge risks involved and if he achieves them, he has certainly earned them. That's the essence of private enterprise.

At eight o'clock she laid ______ whatever she was doing to tell the children a story before they went to bed.

venture investment

Thomas Hardy's novels are said to suffer from the 'long arm of coincidence' because too many events seem to have a casual rather than a ______ connection.

During the opera's most famous aria the tempo chosen by the orchestra's conductor seemed ______, without necessary relation to what had gone before.

narrow escape

The earliest controversies about the relationship between photography and art centered on whether photograph's fidelity to appearances and dependence on a machine allowed it to be a fine art as distinct from merely a practical art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the defence of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photography was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was instead a privileged way of seeing, a revolt against commonplace vision, and no less worthy an art than painting. Ironically, now that photography is securely established as a fine art, many photographers find it pretentious or irrelevant to label it as such. Serious photographers variously claim to be finding, recording, impartially observing, witnessing events, exploring themselves—anything but making works of art. They are no longer willing to debate whether photography is or is not a fine art, except to proclaim that their own work is not involved with art. It shows the extent to which they simply take for granted the concept of art imposed by the triumph of Modernism: the better the art, the more subversive it is of the traditional aims of art. Photographers' disclaimers of any interest in making art tell us more about the harried status of the contemporary notion of art than about whether photography is or is not art. For example, those photographers who suppose that, by taking pictures, they are getting away from the pretensions of art as exemplified by painting remind us of those Abstract Expressionist painters who imagined they were getting away from the intellectual austerity of classical Modernist painting by concentrating on the physical act of painting. Much of photography's prestige today derives from the convergence of its aims with those of recent art, particularly with the dismissal of abstract art implicit in the phenomenon of Pop painting during the 1960's. Appreciating photographs is a relief to sensibilities tired of the mental exertions demanded by abstract art. Classical Modernist painting—that is, abstract art as developed in different ways by Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse—presupposes highly developed skills of looking and a familiarity with other paintings and the history of art. Photography, like Pop painting, reassures viewers that art is not hard; photography seems to be more about its subjects than about art. Photography, however, has developed all the anxieties and self-consciousness of a classic Modernist art. Many professionals privately have begun to worry that the promotion of photography as an activity subversive of the traditional pretensions of art has gone so far that the public will forget that photography is a distinctive and exalted activity—in short, an art.

扩大内需

家庭暴力

IPO

The ______ company has an excellent reputation-which is understandable, since it's been in business for twenty years and has thousands of satisfied customers.

Passage One The increase in leisure time, the higher standard of living, the availability of cars to a wider range of the population and, perhaps, a broadening of personal horizons have all contributed to a drastic change in the summer week-end habits of the British publiC. Now, on most Saturdays in the months loosely called summer, it is possible to see family saloons loaded with picnics and crammed to bursting with several generations of pleasure-bent Smiths'. Like competitors in some grossly disorganized rally, they nose their way through the neat drab streets of council estates, converging on the main roads, then crawl as best they can out into the open country and towards the coast. Congestion and the frustration of wasting precious time at the receiving end of someone else's exhaust fumes gets the pursuit of enjoyment off to had start; tempersbecome frayed. Children, traditionally the target for fathers' ill-humor, are singled out for special treatment. The past week's misdeeds are unearthed and magnified out of all reasonable proportion; mothers leap to their broods' defense and, before long, vows that never again will this outing be repeated are being hurled back and forth. Of course, by this time, the children have wisely extracted themselves from the argument and are quietly amusing themselves by looking at their irate elders or gaping at the unfamiliar sight of animals in fields, often so much stranger to them than the corresponding naked shapes they are wont to see in butchers' windows. Eventually, tempers partially restored, the sea is in sight. The paraphernalia of enjoyment is set up on teeming beach, sand mysteriously appears in every sandwich, pale industrial legs are exposed in self-conscious nakedness. The children drift away, quite capable of finding enough magic in this exciting, watery world to occupy them fully until they are gathered in again. Fathers and mothers, and quite possibly some members of a previous generation, settle back to receive the sun and dream away the tensions brought to a climax by the journey. Fathers eye with furtive lustfulness and mothers glare with disapproval and envy as the shapely matrons of tomorrow splash and play and race coquettishly around them, spraying water and sand and disturbing any hopes of peace. At length the shadows drop and chill in the air brings an end to the idyll. The lobster skin is painfully covered up and the day's debris half-heartedly collected. The family is rounded up and the brief dreams trodden into the sand along with the wasted paper.

translatability

Thoughts in Westminster Abbey Joseph Addison When I am in a serious humour, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey, where the gloominess of the place, and the use to which it is applied, with the solemnity of the building, and the condition of the people who lie in it, are apt to fill the mind with a kind of melancholy, or rather thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable. I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the churchyard, the cloisters, and the church, amusing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions that I met with in those several regions of the dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the buried person, but that he was born upon one day, and died upon another: the whole history of his life being comprehended in those two circumstances that are common to all mankind. I could not but look upon these registers of existence, whether of brass or marble, as a kind of satire upon the departed persons; who had left no other memorial of them, but that they were born and that they died. They put me in mind of several persons mentioned in the battles of heroic poems, who have sounding names given them, for no other reason but that they may be killed, and are celebrated for nothing but being knocked on the head. The life of these men is finely described in Holy Writ by 'the path of an arrow,' which is immediately dosed up and lost. Upon my going into the church, I entertained myself with the digging of a grave; and saw in every shovelful of it that was thrown up, the fragment of a bone or skull intermit with a kind of fresh moldering earth, that some time or other had a place in the composition of a human body. Upon this, I began to consider with myself what innumerable multitudes of people lay confused together under the pavement of that ancient cathedral; how men and women, friends and enemies, priests and soldiers, monks and prebendaries, were crumbled amongst one another, and blended together in the same common mass; how beauty, strength, and youth, with old age, weakness and deformity, lay undistinguished in the same promiscuous heap of matter.

《西游记》

Much as ______, I couldn't lend him the money because I simply didn't have that much spare cash.

The heat in summer is no less ______ here in this mountain region.

发展为了人民、发展依靠人民、发展成果由人民共享

He would have finished his college education, but he ______ to quit and find a job to support his family.