Has the world just witnessed its first ever robot suicide? Boring housework was seemingly too much for one cleaning robot to take, when it apparently rebelled and decided to end it all.
The robot was given the tiresome task of cleaning up some spilt grain before it climbed on to a kitchen hotplate ___ it destroyed itself, according to reports in Austria. It had reportedly grown tired of
_____(force) to clean the house every day and decided to become a martyr(殉道者) to the robot cause.
“Somehow it seems ____(restart) itself again before it made its way along the work surface. Then it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and basically that was the end of it,” explained fireman Helmut Kniewasser, who
_____(call) to deal with the fire at Hinterstoder in Kirchdorf. “It pretty quickly started to melt underneath and then stuck to the kitchen hotplate. It then caught fire.
___ _____ _____ we arrived, it had become just a pile of ash.” He added: “The entire building
____ _____be evacuated (疏散) and there was severe smoke damage particularly in the flat in which the robot had been in use. “It’s a mystery how it came to be started and ended up making its way to the hotplate.”
____ took an hour to clean and make the building safe. The homeowner plans to charge the robot’s manufacturer.
In most Chinese tea villages, March is the time of year inlocals start to pick and process tea. The usually quiet villages suddenly become busy centers of activity, as people take out special tools and prepare
tea processing. In some villages, local residents hold traditional ceremonies,
(thank) heaven for its blessing. The price of tea
(pick) in March is extremely high because
is fresh, tender and contains multiple trace elements.
China (be) famous for tea production since ancient times. Of the goods transported and traded along
Old Silk Road linking China to the Middle East and Europe, the importance of tea was matched only by silk. China produces Oolong, black, green, white, yellow
dark (aka post-fermented) tea. The Oolong, green and black
(vary)are most notable for their high quality.
Most of China's tea villages are found in remote mountainous areas in the country's south and southwest, the beautiful scenery is often hidden under clouds.
My friend Vernon Davies kept birds. One day he called and told me he was going away for a week.He asked me to feed __birds for him and said that he would leave the key_
_his front door in my mailbox.
__(fortunate), I forgot all about the birds until the night before Vernon was going to return. What was worse,_
_was already dark when I arrived at his house. I soon found that the key Verson gave me could not unlock either the front door _
__the back door. I was getting desperate. I kept thinking of
__Vernon would say when he came back.
I was just going to give up__I noticed that one bedroom window was slightly open. I found a barrel and pushed in under the window. As the barrel was very heavy, I made a lot of noise. But in the end, I managed to climb
__and open the window.
I actually had one leg inside the bedroom when I suddenly realized that someone __(shine) a torch up at me. I looked down and saw a policeman and an old lady, one of Vernon’s neighbors. “What are you doing up there?: said the policeman._
__(feel)like a complete fool, I replied,”I was just going to feed Mr Davies’ birds.
Shopping habits in America have changed a lot over the past few decades. Early ____ the 1900s most American towns and cities had a Main Street. Main Street was always in __
__ heart of a town. This street was built with many stores on both sides. Shoppers walked into the stores to look _
__ what they needed. _
__, a change began to take place in the 1950s. Too many cars had crowded into Main Street while too __
parking places were available(可用的) to shoppers. __
_ the streets were crowded, shop owners began ___
__ look with interest at the open space from the city limits. When the first shopping center was built in the United States, an open space became __
___ they first had considered.
People ___(live)in different countries made different kinds of words. Today there are about fifteen hundred __
_ in the world. Each contains many thousands of words. A very large dictionary, for example, contains four ___
_five hundred thousand words. But we do not need___
___ these. To read short stories you need to know only about two thousand words. __
__you leave school, you will learn only one thousand or more.
The words you know are called your vocabulary. You should try to make your vocabulary ____(big). Read as many books as we can. There are a lot of books ___
___(write)in easy English. You will enjoy them. When you meet __
_ new word, look it __
___ in your dictionary. Your dictionary is your __
_(much)useful book.
两千三百年前中国大哲孟子谓:“充实之谓美,充实而光辉之谓大,大而化之之谓圣,圣而不可知之之谓神。”此可总揽普天下所有大艺术之警世通言也,中、西莫不皆然。八大山人、伦勃朗、莎士比亚、陶潜,于美、大、圣、神皆有之矣,然其趋舍异途,绝无可融合处。比较艺术的目的,所望于后来者,为加大其距离,非缩小而趋同也。
The great Chinese philosopher Mencius, _______ lived two thousand and three hundred years ago, said, “Substantiality is called beauty; when substantiality is brightly displayed, it is called greatness; _
_______ greatness exercises a transforming influence, it is called sacredness; when sacredness is beyond our understanding, it is called divinity.” This extraordinary proposition is applicable to all the great arts of the world, ____
_____(include) both Chinese and Western ones. The great Chinese artist of the seventeenth century Bada Shanren (1626—1705), the great artist of the Netherlands Rembrandt (1606—1669), the great British ____
____ (drama) William Shakespeare (1564—1616), and the great Chinese poet Tao Qian (c.365—427), who lived between the fourth and fifth centuries, all possessed the qualities of __
_______, greatness, sacredness, and divinity. _
_________, the objectives they aimed at, the things they chose to cast _______
___(side) and their approaches varied greatly from one another. There is _____
_______ (absolute) nothing that can be synthesized. Comparing the objectives of art, I hope that future artists will _______
___ the distance between Eastern art and Western art, instead of reducing it or gradually converging one into the ______
_________.