For Sparky, it was all but impossible to study well at school. He never passed _______ exams in high school. After receiving a zero in the course, he thought himself as the _______ Physics student in the school’s history. Sparky didn’t do much better in sports either. Although he joined the school’s golf team, he quickly _______ a match of the season. What’s more, Sparky was not sociable. He dared not talk to others and would feel shocked if a classmate said hello to him outside of school hours.

However, one thing was _______ to Sparky—drawing. He was proud of his artworks. In his senior year of high school, he tried to send some cartoons to editors. They were _______. However, Sparky didn’t give up after this unhappy experience. After graduating from high school, he wrote a letter to Walt Disney Studios. He was _______ and advised to send some of his artworks. Sparky felt so excited that he drew some cartoons and sent them. He was full of _______ and waited. Finally, the reply came from the studios. But he was rejected once again.

Then Sparky decided to write his own cartoon. In the cartoon, he described himself as a boy loser who would never fly a kite and never _______ kicking a ball.

For Sparky, the cartoon boy was himself, who always _______ at school and whose works were rejected again and again.

To his surprise, the cartoon character soon became _______ worldwide. And he was known to the world for the popular comic strip “Peanuts”.

One day in 1903, French scientist Edouard Benedictus stood on a ladder in his lab. As he reached up to get something on a high shelf, his arm brushed an empty glass bottle and it dropped to the floor.

Benedictus climbed down, expecting a mess, but he found a surprise. The glass hadn’t fragmented! It had broken into a spiderweb-like pattern, but it had held together. Benedictus wondered why.

Later he knew one of his students had used the bottle to hold liquid plastic during an experiment. Later the liquid plastic dried itself. The student thought the bottle had been washed, so he put it back on the shelf. Benedicts realized the coating of dried plastic had kept the broken glass from falling apart.

The same week, a Paris newspaper printed an article about car accidents: The car was a new and exciting invention then, and more and more people were driving on the roads. Unluckily, there were no traffic lights or stop signs yet. In accidents, people were often hurt by flying broken glass when car windows broke.

After reading the article, the image of the broken glass bottle suddenly appeared before Benedictus’s eyes. ▲ He jumped up and ran to his lab.

Benedictus spent the whole day experimenting. Over and over again, he coated glass with liquid plastic and broke it, trying to figure out the best way to make glass that wouldn’t fragment. Finally, Benedictus put the liquid plastic between two pieces of glass and made them stick together. When he hit it, the glass-and-plastic sandwich broke, but not into pieces.

Benedictus had done it! That’s how an unexpected meeting between an unwashed glass bottle and a careless scientist led to an invention that made us all safer.

A．	B．
C．	D．

Computers and smartphones are perfect servants. They always do what they are “told”. We usually “tell” them to do things with a mouse or a keyboard.     60    

This technology, known as voice control, has been shown in films and TV shows since the 1960s. The Star Trek TV series, which first showed up on the screen at that time, had spaceships that could reply to human voice commands. A Space Odyssey showed a computer that human astronauts could talk to.     61    

    62     You might know well about Siri and Alexa, two examples of voice control systems developed by Apple and Amazon. They can be asked to do many things, from setting alarms and playing music to placing online shopping orders and controlling household appliances.

One of the nice things about voice control is that it can be used when you’re on the go. When you’re driving a car or walking down the sidewalk, it can be inconvenient or even dangerous to pick up your smartphone and type on the keyboard.     63    

People with hearing disabilities will also welcome the technology.     64     Some can even hear words spoken in one language and then translate them into another language.