The Creator of Middle Earth

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, better known as J. R. R. Tolkien, was born in 1892 in South Africa. His parents had moved there looking for     1     better job for his father. Three years     2    (late), his mother took him on a trip to England to visit family. While they were away, they received terrible news that his father had died.

    3    (grow ) up without a father must have been difficult for Tolkien. Worse still, when he was only twelve years old, his mother also passed away. As a child, he had a great passion for language and in 1908, he went to Oxford University     4    (study) languages and literature. In 1915, he joined the army and fought in the battle against the Germans. But soon, he became too ill to fight and returned     5     England the following year. He didn’t have a     6    (satisfy) childhood himself, so around in 1933, he spent much time telling his children fantasy     7    (story) of a hobbit (霍比特人) called Bilbo. He first put it in writing in 1936,     8     turned out to be a surprising hit. The publisher asked him to write another. He did so and in 1948 published The Lord of the Rings, which     9    (publish) in three volumes between 1954 and 1955.

Tolkien,     10    (age) eighty-one, died in 1973.

Qian Zhongshu was a Chinese scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition(博学). Despite failing in mathematics, Qian     1    (success) entered the Department of Foreign Languages under Tsinghua University in 1929 because of his     2    (excellence) performance in Chinese and English languages. In Tsinghua, he met his wife Yang Jiang, who was to become a successful playwright and translator, and     3    (marry) her in 1935. In the same year, Qian received government sponsorship     4    (promote) his studies abroad. Together with his wife, Qian headed for the University of Oxford in Britain. After     5    (spend) two years at Exeter College, he received a bachelor of literature. He studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France, and he didn’t return to China     6     1938.

Qian lived in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945,     7     was then under Japanese occupation. At that time he devoted     8    (he) to writing and many of his works were written or published then. A collection of short     9    (essay), Writing in the Margins of Life, was published in 1941. His most celebrated work Fortress Besieged appeared in 1947. On the Art of Poetry, written     10     classical Chinese was issued in 1948.