Beef cattle ______ of all livestock for economic growth in the certain geographic regions.
In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21th century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic apparatus—an even more omnivorous iPhone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn—and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing.The book—the physical paper book—is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 percent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Destruction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading—Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating—but then, a few years ago, he “become aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.”I think most of us have this sense today, if we are honest. If you read a book with your laptop thrumming on the other side of the room, it can be like trying to read in the middle of a party, where everybody is shouting to each other. To read, you need to slow down. You need mental silence except for the words. That’s getting harder to find.No, don’t misunderstand me. I adore the web, and they will have to wrench my Twitter feed from my cold dead hands. This isn’t going to turn into an antediluvian rant against the glories of our wired world. But there’s a reason why that word—“wired”—means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”.In the age of the internet, physical paper books are a technology we need more, not less. In the 1950s, the novelist Herman Hesse wrote: “The more the need for entertainment and mainstream education can be met by new inventions, the more the book will recover its dignity and authority. We have not yet quite reached the point where young competitors, such as radio, cinema, etc, have taken over the functions from the book it can’t afford to lose.”31. By mentioning the work of Gary Steynghart, the author intends to ________.32. The most significant reason for the falling sales of paper books is that ________.33. According to paragraph 3, we can infer that ________.34. The explanation of the word “wired” probably indicates that ________.35. Which of the following will the author most probably agree on?
Part V Writing (15 points)Directions: For this part, you are allowed 30 minutes to write a composition of no less than 200 words under the title of “Science: Good or Evil”. Please write clearly on the Answer Sheet.
He ______ his considerable bulk between me and the window, so that I could not see out.
Ignorance and ______ prevent them from benefiting from modern medicine.
The members in favor of his suggestion ______ their agreement by raising their hands.