【阅读选择】Tom, a near-sighted young man, went on a blind date with a girl. The two were satisfied with each other. And they exchanged their telephone numbers. What can we learn about Tom?

【阅读选择】Secondary school had its own share of challenges. I was a tall kid and wasn't good at any sport, except looking. I loved basketball and tennis. The first day I held a racket, and I was disgraced by my opponent. He won six straight sets without sweat and there I was, sweating badly like I'd run a marathon, whereas I hadn’t even made a single point.Stanley was disgraced by his classmate in a ___________.

【阅读选择】The farm is set right next to a beautiful flood plain and the property is home to trees that have lived for thousands of years. All of the villages throughout Botswana(博茨瓦纳) have their own chief who controls a certain amount of land. We had the opportunity to sit in on a meeting with the chief of Katchikow, which we called it “Catch a Cow.” In the meeting we discussed starting a hydroponics farm in his area. He seemed to be all for it and said that it was god’s plan that the project we were helping with had come to his area.The chief of each village _____________.

【阅读选择】One reason is economic. In a traditional agricultural economy, large families are helpful. Having more children means having more workers in the fields and someone to take care of the parents in old age. In an industrial economy, the situation is different. Many children do not help a family; instead, they are an expense. Thus, industrialization has generally brought down the birth rate. This was the case in Italy, which was industrialized quite recently and rapidly. In the early part of the twentieth century, Italy was a poor, largely agricultural country with a high birth rate. After World WarⅡ, Italy's economy was rapidly modernized and industrialized. By the end of the century, the birth rate had dropped to 1.3 children per woman, the world's lowest.In a traditional agricultural economy, a large family_______.

【阅读选择】You consider that you can’t find your place in your own country, so you risk the comfortable but modest life with your parents and you go abroad. Maybe there will be moments when you can’t stand the loneliness anymore, the strangers around you, or your job. But you remember nobody made you take that decision, so you take a deep breath, and you go on, as you are the only one to be blamed.When you are lonely in a foreign country, you should ________.

【阅读选择】If you enjoy looking through travel books by such familiar authors as Arthur Frommer or Eugene Fodor, it will not surprise you to learn that travel writing has a long and venerable history. Almost from the earliest annals of recorded time individuals have found ready audiences for their accounts of journeys to strange and exotic locales. This passage is mostly about__________.

【阅读选择】When I graduated from high school, my family had a business so I never thought about getting a college degree. I went straight from my high school graduation to work for my father. After 24 years of ups and downs(mostly downs), I decided that I wanted to return to school and earn a degree in Business Administration.Why didn’t the author go on with education after graduating from high school?

【阅读选择】She told me her name was Helen and she was talking to a local restaurant where they were going to have lunch after her appointment. She called to see if he was there. She said, “My husband has Alzheimer’s(老年痴呆) and he shouldn’t be driving without me.” Numerous thoughts ran through my head. Call the police, call her family, and notify(通知) the doctor’s office she had just come from! But at first, I offered to drive to the local restaurant to see if Ed was waiting for her there. The elderly woman cried in the lobby when she was talking to ________.

【阅读选择】I recognized that the sites such as Associated Content can provide a fertile ground for learning how to become a better writer. I could see that this was an open door for systematically learning some basic writing skills without paying college tuition for classes and leaving the comfort of my own home. In the eyes of the author, the site Associated Content __________.

【阅读选择】The United States perceives itself to be a middle-class nation. However, middle class is not a real designation, nor does it carry privileges. It is more of a perception, which probably was as true as it ever could be right after World War II. The economy was growing, more and more people owned their own homes, workers had solid contracts with the companies that employed them, and nearly everyone who wanted a higher education could have one. The information in this passage deals with_______.