Festivals are celebrated all around the world. No matter how different they may seem, the spirit of     1    (share) joy, gratitude, love or peace is common in all festivals. Of all the traditional festivals, the harvest festival can     2    (find) in almost every culture. People celebrate it     3     (show) that they are grateful for the year’s supply of food. Customs play a     4    (significance) role in festivals, but sometimes they can change over time. One example is Halloween,     5    slowly became an exciting festival for children, in spite     6    its religious origins.

Festivals are becoming more and more commercial, with businesses     7    (take) advantage of the celebrations. Online shopping websites and social media apps have made it much     8    (easy) for the public to spend more on gifts for their loved ones. Festivals are an important part of society. They reflect people’s wishes,     9    (believe), faiths, and attitudes towards life. And if you study festivals     10    (careful), you may be surprised to find that different cultures actually have a lot in common after all.

Qingdao International Beer Festival has become a major event in the beautiful city. The first festival took place in 1991. It is now held once a year from the end of July to the end of August,     1     (last) for about one month. Qingdao is the     2     (large) beer production base in China and the festival provides a great chance     3     (show) the city’s unique characteristics. With     4     history of over 30 years, Qingdao International Beer Festival is a nationally     5     (recognize) event, and combines together tourism, culture and sports. As one of the most important     6     (festival) of China, it has a worldwide reputation and attracts millions of people to take part every year. More than 100 brands (品牌) from all over the world     7     (join) in the event over the past 16 years successfully. Every year daily performances     8     (give) at Beer Town’s Center Theatre, where colorful fountains, hi-tech laser shows and dramatic audio effects excite audiences. Whether walking on the roads, shopping in the local stores     9     even catching a ride in a taxi, you will constantly hear people talking about the festival.     10     (obvious), after 16 years of development, the festival has become part of local people’s daily lives.

No discussion about Chinese culture is complete without mentioning the Great Wall,    1    is unequalled in the world in its scale (规模) and span of construction, as well as for the great quantities of labor and the degree of    2    (difficult) involved. Why did this ancient country build the Great Wall more than 2,000 years?

The earliest parts of the Great Wall    3    (build) during constant wars. Suffering    4    the damage of wars, people realized that building a wall    5    (protect) lives was better than burying the dead. Building walls was    6    (extreme) hard work, sometimes even at the cost of life itself.    7    (compare) with bloody wars, however, the former was preferred by people. The Great Wall served the purposes of military (军事的) defense in the age of cold steel, especially in stopping northern peoples on horseback    8    (attack) people in the south who were mostly farmers. It provided them with    9    sense of security as well as actual protection.

Thus the great Wall represented people's longing for a    10    (peace) life.

Some time after 10,000 BC, people made the first real attempt to control the world they lived     1    , through agriculture. Over thousands of years, they began to depend less on     2     could be hunted or gathered from the wild and more on animals they had raised and crops they had sown.

Farming produced more food per person     3     hunting and gathering, so people were able to raise more children. And as more children were born, more food     4    (need). Agriculture gave people their first experience of the power of technology to change lives.

By about 6000 BC, people     5    (discover)the best crops to grow and animals to raise. Later, they learned to work with the     6    (season), planting at the right time and in dry areas,     7    (make)use of annual floods to irrigate(灌溉)their fields.

This style of farming lasted for quite a long time. Then with     8     rise of science, changes began. New methods meant fewer people worked in farming. In the last century or     9    , these changes have accelerated(加速). New power machinery and artificial fertilizers(人造化肥)have now     10    (entire)transformed a way of life that started in the Stone Age.

Peru is a country on the Pacific coast of South America. Its capital is Lima,     1     is in the north on the coast. It’s the motherland of the Inca civilization and home to Machu Picchu. Once governed by Spain, Peru gained its independence in 1821. Cuzco,     2     ancient Inca Empire capital, is a popular destination with many hotels and inns where both Indian and Spanish culture and art can     3     (see).