Passage Three

When she returned home after a year in South America, Judith Martin, a North American writer, began to have a problem. People kept interpreting her behavior as flirtatious, but she was not flirting. Fairly soon she figured out what was happening.

When most South Americans talk to each other face-to-face, they stand closer together than do North Americans. Martin had not readjusted to North American distances. Apparently, she had forgotten about the phenomenon known as personal space — the amount of physical distance people expect during social interaction. Everyone has expectations concerning the use of personal space, but accepted distances for that space are determined by each person’s culture.

Observations about personal space began about twenty years ago. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall was a pioneer in the field. He became very interested in how interpersonal distances affected communication between people. In his book The Hidden Dimension, Hall coined the word “proxemics” to describe people’s use of space as a means of communication. As Hall’s book title indicates, most people are unaware that interpersonal distances exist and contribute to people’s reactions to one another.Personal space depends on invisible boundaries. Those boundaries move with people as they interact.

Personal space gets larger or smaller depending on the circumstances of the social interaction at any moment. People do not like anyone to trespass on their personal space. As Worchel and Cooper explain, invasions of personal space elicit negative reactions that range from mild discomfort to retaliation to walking out on the situation.

Researchers working with Hall’s data found that accepted interpersonal distances in the United States also depend on other factors. For example, subcultures help determine expectations concerning personal space. Fisher, Bell, and Baum report that groups of Hispanic-Americans generally interact more closely within their subculture than Anglo-Americans do within theirs. They further explain that in general subcultural groups tend to interact at closer distances with members of their own subculture than with nonmembers.

It was a great shock to me to discover that I had motor neuron disease. (46. I had never been very well co-coordinated physically as a child. I was not good at ball games, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers.) But things seemed to change when I went to Oxford, at the age of 17. (47.I took up coxing and rowing. I was not boat race standard, but I got by at the level of inter-college competition.)

In my third year at Oxford, however, I noticed that I seemed to be getting clumsier, and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason. But it was not until I was at Cambridge, in the following year, that my father noticed, and took me to the family doctor. He referred me to a specialist, and shortly after my 21st birthday, I went into hospital for tests.

The realization that I had an incurable disease, that was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock. (48. How could something like that happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this? Not knowing what was going to happen to me, or how rapidly the disease would progress, I was at a loose end.) The doctors told me to go back to Cambridge and carry on with the research I had just started in general relativity and cosmology.But I was not making much progress, because I didn’t have much mathematical background. And, anyway, I might not live long enough to finish my Phd. I felt somewhat of a tragic character.

But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. (49. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved. In fact, although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before.) I began to make progress with my research, and I got engaged to a girl called Jane Wilde, whom I had met just about the time my condition was diagnosed. That engagement changed my life. It gave me something to live for. But it also meant that I had to get a job if we were to get married. I therefore applied for a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. To my great surprise, I got a fellowship, and we got married a few months later.

The fellowship at Caius took care of my immediate employment problem. (50. I was lucky to have chosen to work in theoretical physics, because that was one of the few areas in which my condition would not be a serious handicap.) And I was fortunate that my scientific reputation increased, at the same time that my disability got worse. This meant that people were prepared to offer me a sequence of positions in which I only had to do research without having to lecture.

Passage Nine

The reigning queen of all media in the US is talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. Her influence goes beyond her daily one-hour show into everything from the publishing business to the agricultural markets. Do you need proof? When Winfrey discusses an unknown author on her show, his book goes to the top of the best-seller charts.

Queen of t______.

Passage Ten

London’s underground railway will replace commuters’ sweaty odors with the gentle waft of perfume when it introduces a new air freshener into the world’s oldest subway. London has imported a powerful perfume, called Madeleine, from the Paris Metro. Madeleine will be used to mask the pungent smells of London’s underground.

Perfume masks c______ odors.

Passage Six

Several governments in Europe have decided that radical action is required to increase the number of women in the executive suite. Norway passed a law in 2003 that obliged all publicly listed firms to reserve 40% of the seats on their boards for women by 2008. Spain passed a similar law in 2007; France earlier this year.

The Netherlands is working on one.More women in b______ top.

Passage Seven

The business travel and meetings organization in America attributes the recent increase to rising airfares, fuelled by energy prices, constrained capacity and relatively strong demand, higher lodging rates, and growing corporate demansd. For example, it expects corporate spending on overseas trips to rise to $31.8 billion in 2011, a 9.1% increase on last year.

The price of t______ continues rising in America in 2011.

Passage Eight

The row over phone-hacking by journalists has led to the closure of the News of the World newspaper, and wider questions about press regulation, media ownership, the police, and relationships between politicians and journalists. It admitted intercepting voicemails in April after years of rumor that the practice was widespread.

Ethics in j______.

Paragraph Four

Scientists have found that life can survive in boiling pools of toxic water at Yellowstone National Park, something they did not think was possible. The fact that life can thrive in a boiling pool brings up all sorts of ideas about the origins of life. It may be that the first life on Earth was in the places humans might consider hospitable.

Finding life in unusual p______.

Paragraph Three

The IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, warned that the nuclear crisis triggered by Japan’s earthquake and tsunami is far from over. The lesson Germany learns from the Japanese nuclear disaster is that the earlier the exit, the better. Germany would turn to green and clean technologies and become a nuclear-free country.

Germany’s reflection on nuclear e ______.

Paragraph Five

“This type of meal, this fast food made with ground beef with a certain tomato sauce, fries does not strike me as a universal dream!” said Jean Glavany, France’s agriculture minister. “I want to spare Europeans this,” he said. “My struggle is cultural—what I have opposed and still oppose is the imperialism of a food model that wants to be the only model.”

The b______ over fast food.

Paragraph One

A 39-year-old woman, a patient in a psychiatric clinic had locked herself in a toilet with a knife. Police brought the dog Purzel when they learned the woman was a dog lover. As soon as the woman spotted Purzel sniffing through a crack in the door she dropped the knife and picked him up.

Hero dog p ______ a suicide.