人们现在感到不满意，不是因为事情比以往更糟，而是因为比以往任何时候都好。以婚姻为例，在加利福尼亚，十对夫妇中有约六对离婚——在一些较富裕的社区这个比例还要高一些。必须承认，这些数字反映出许多不满。但人们从未像现在这样渴望和欢迎婚姻。的确，婚姻是如此地引人入胜，连很多正在办离婚的人几乎等不及法律许可，就想再度结婚了。

Directing the union are technological advances that have made it easier to store and rapidly transmit information into homes and offices. Fiber-optic cable, for example—made up of hair-thin glass fibers—is a tremendously efficient carrier of information. Lasers shooting light through glass fiber can transmit 250,000 times as much data as a standard telephone wire, or tens of thousands of paragraphs such as this one every second.The greatly increased volume and speed of data transmission that these technologies permit can be compared to the way in which a highway with many lanes allows more cars to move at faster speeds than a two-lane highway—hence, the information superhighway.

Beef cattle ______ of all livestock for economic growth in the certain geographic regions.

John boasted that he could finish the job all by himself in no time.

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?

Professor Smith said to his students that no one should ______ the mistakes.