【推荐1】Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

Kazuo Ishiguro has a number of strings to his bow, or rather bis guitar     1    62-year-old is world famous as a writer of fiction, but his early dream was to be a great singer and songwriter.

His friend and former publisher Robert McCrum recalls him     2    (turn)up at the publishing house Faber and Faber with a bunch of his stories in one hand and e guitar over his shoulder. It was his stories     3    earned him the great honor.

As his name indicates, Ishiguro comes from a Japanese background, although he came to Britain from Japan at the age of 5 and is a Britain citizen who writes in English. He     4    (educate) at the University of East Anglia ,a school that has become known for training writers.

Ishiguro's writing is highly restrained. His characters are often reluctant to express themselves, except in a kind of code. This certainly gives his writing a quality in common with that of Jane Austen, an author to whom he is often compared. The best example of this is his novel The Remains of the Day,     5    (adapt) later into a successful film with the same name.

The central character of the book is a butler called Stevens. He is an extremely loyal servant to an English lord, and is a character     6    some might call repressed(压抑的). He is not willing to confess his feelings to anyone     7    he misses out on(错失) affection and love.

The story is told by Stevens and his style is as polite and unrevealing as his behavior. Of course we     8    read between the lines to uncover the “real” story, which isn’t quite the one the butler is telling. Stevens finds it challenging     9    (communicate), and communication is often a theme in Ishiguro’s novels.

In his author’s sense of the world, there is a gap between our feelings and our ability to communicate     10    . The Nobel Committee emphasized this theme when it talked about communicate Ishiguro’s work. The writer has, the committee claimed, “in novels of great emotional force...uncovered the abyss(深渊) beneath our illusory(虚幻的) sense of connection with the world.”

【推荐3】Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word or phrase that best fits each blank.

Mo Yan's writings cover a wide span, from short stories, to novels, to essays. His path    1    a literary career was not clear-cut. Mo Yan was born to a poor farming family in Shandong Province, China.    2    he spent only a few years in school, he began work as a cattle herder at the age of 11. As a young man, Mo Yan enlisted in the army,    3    his literary talent was first discovered. He published his first short story in 1981, which, like his    4    (early) works, was written according to the widespread literary demands of the ruling government.

Over time, however, Mo Yan's storytelling began to seek out    5    own, more independent paths. His international breakthrough came with the novel Red Sorghum. Other famous works ' by the Nobel Prize-awarded author    6    (include) The Garlic Ballads and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Mo Yan's writing often uses older Chinese literature and popular oral traditions as a starting point,    7    (combine) these with contemporary social issues.

On October 11, 2012, Mo Yan became the first Chinese author living inside China without French citizenship and accepted by the Chinese government    8    (win) the Nobel Prize in Literature.

    9    (translate) well in foreign languages around the world, his works made him one of the great novelistic masters of modern Chinese literature, with    10    long list of ambitious novels to his name. His writing is powerful, visual, and broad, dipping into history, fantasy and absurdity to tell stories of China and its people. He is often regarded as the Chinese writer with the most potential to appeal to an international audience.