8. Robin is a careful driver, and he drives ________ than my brother.

One morning a mailman walked up to a house. He rang the bell. A few seconds later a window of the house opened, and a woman put her head     16    .

“What is it?” she asked.

“I’ve got a package for Mrs. Smith,” the mailman said.

“Is it registered（挂号的）?” The woman asked. “Yes,” the mailman said. “Is it a big package or a small package?” the woman wants to know.

“It is quite a small package,” the mailman told her.

“I see.” The woman thought for a minute, and then she said, “Who is it from?”

The mailman looked at the     17     on the back of the package. “It is from Jones and Jones in London”, he said.

Now the woman was very interesting. “From Jones and Jones, eh?” she said “That is a very expensive shop. What is in it?”

“Madam,” the mailman said, becoming quite angry with the woman, “I don’t know. Why don’t you     18     and take the package from me. Then you can open it and find out.”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” the woman said.

“Why not?” the mailman asked.

“Because I’m not Mrs. Smith,” she said, “you’ve come to the wrong house. Mrs. Smith lives     19     door.”

For 99% of human history, people took their food from the world around them. They ate all that they could find, and then moved on. Then about 10,000 years ago, or for 1% of human history, people learned to farm the land.

The kind of food we eat depends on which part of the world we live in, or which part of our country we live in. For example, in the south of China they eat rice, but in the north they eat noodles. In European countries near the sea, people eat a lot of fishes. In central (中部) Europe, away from the sea, people don’t eat so much fish, they eat more meat. In Germany and Poland there are hundreds of different kinds of sausages.

In North America, Australia, and Europe, people eat with knives and forks. In China, people eat with chopsticks. In parts of India and the Middle East people use their fingers and bread to pick up food.

Nowadays it is possible to transport (运输) food easily from one part of the world to the other. We can eat what we like, when we like, at any time of the year. In Britain, bananas come from Africa; rice comes from India or the USA; strawberries come from Chile or Spain. Food is very big business. But people in poor countries are still hungry, and people in rich countries eat too much.

There was a woman in Detroit（底特律）, who had two sons. She was worried about them, especially the younger one, Ben,   ________ he was not doing well in school. The boys in his class made jokes about him because he looked so slow.

The mother decided that she must get her sons to do better in school.

She told them to go to the Detroit Public Library to read a book every week and do a report about it for her.

One day, in Ben’s class, the teacher held up a rock（岩石）and asked if anyone knew it. Ben ________ his hand and the teacher let him answer.

“Why did Ben raise his hand?” they wondered. “He ________ said anything”; “What could he possibly want to say?”...

Well, Ben not only knew the rock but also named other rocks in its group and even knew ________ the teacher found it. The teacher and the students were ________. Ben learned all this from doing one of his book reports.

Ben later went on to the top of his class. When he finished high school, he went to Yale University and at last became on of the ________ doctors in the United States.

Students learn their lessons in class. They sit in the classroom and l    47     to the teacher. This is a way of learning. Is this the o    48     way for students to learn? Of course not. There is another way to learn. That is students can teach t    49    . For example, if you don’t know a word when you are doing your homework, what will you do? You can look it u    50     in the dictionary to find the meaning.

How to teach yourself? The first thing you must do is reading. Read something you are really i    51     in. The second is that you must ask yourself questions. Usually a clever student is good at asking questions. The third is to answer the questions yourself b    52     thinking hard. These are the ways of teaching yourself. If you keep doing these for a long time, you are sure to make great p    53     in your study.

Julia Hill, an American woman, was born in 1974. She was 23 years old when she discovered that a company wanted to cut down part of a forest in California. In the forest there were lots of redwood trees. One of the trees was 70 metres tall and 1,000 years old.

Julia wasn’t happy about this. She traveled to California and climbed up the tree. “If I sit in the tree,” she said, “the company can’t cut it down.” At the beginning, Julia planned to stay in the tree for two weeks. She lived in a small tree-house and her friends were very helpful—they cooked food for her every day. She used her mobile phone to talk to her family and to news reporters. She stayed in the tree day and night.

Environmental organizations supported her, but other people weren’t on her side and they tried to stop her. The company used a helicopter that stayed near her tree-house for a long time. The helicopter was very noisy and there was a lot of wind. Julia didn’t like it, but she stayed in the tree.

In the end, she was successful. The company agreed not to cut down the redwood. Finally, after two years and eight days in the tree, Julia Hill climbed down and walked on the ground again. She and her friends were very happy.

60. Write at least 60 words on the topic of “A holiday in ________”, using the following questions for reference. (请根据提示问题，以“________的假期”为题，写一篇短文，不少于60个词，标点符号不占格)