Throughout history, people have fought bitter wars over political ideology, national sovereignty and religious expression. How much more     1     will these conflicts be when people fight over the Earth’s most indispensable resource water? We may find out in the not-too-distant future if projections about the     2     of water in the Middle East and other regions prove correct.

Less than three percent of the planet’s     3     is fresh water, and almost two-thirds of this amount is     4     in ice caps, glaciers, and underground aquifers too deep or too remote to access. In her book, Pillars of Sand-Can the Irrigation Miracle Last, Sandra Postel outlines three forces that     5     tension and conflict over freshwater. Using up the water “resource pie”. In India, the world’s second-most populous nation, with over 1 billion inhabitants, the rate of groundwater     6     is twice that of recharge, a deficit higher than in any other country. Although water is a renewable resource, it is not a(n)     7     one. The freshwater available today for more than 6 billion people is no greater than it was 2,000 years ago, when global population was approximately 200 million. (The current U.S. population is 287 million.)

Global     8     accounts for about 70% of all freshwater use. In five of the world’s most water-stressed, controversial areas the Aral Sea region, the Ganges, the Jordan, the Nileland and Tigris-Euphrates population increases of up to 75% are projected by 2025. With the fastest rate of growth in the world, the population of Palestinian territory will more than     9     over the next generation. Most experts agree that, because of geography, population     10     and politics, water wars are most likely to break out in the Middle East, a region where the amount of available freshwater per capita will decrease by about 50% over the next generation.

For more than three centuries, the American colonies and later, the United States have been a place for many "have-nots" to make the "American Dream" come true for themselves and to become "haves." And the optimism that people have, knowing that this    1    will always happen, has grown out of some key elements in the history of the nation, a nation that has differed profoundly from every other country in the world. The economic    2    of the nation will also be very much tied to these success stories. Three characteristics have contributed to such attainments.

First, the United States had natural resources undreamed of in other parts of the world. For farmers and ranchers there was land, often to be had cheaply or even for free. There were endless forests to supply lumber and rich    3    of coal, oil, silver, copper and gold. Besides, critical to the development of these resources was a population of both native-born Americans and immigrant who were connected by their common work ethic. This ethic held that industry and thrift should be

    4    with - as Benjamin Franklin says -- "a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World," These Americans believed in self improvement as well as in the nobility of all kinds of work. They also, if somewhat    5    , often linked material success with spiritual movement. Next, by and large, America was characterized by a(n)     6    class structure. In contrast to England and other European countries with their history of aristocrats（贵族）, this country was filled by numerous communities in which family connections or    7    money counted for little.

However, the pursuit of American Dream sometimes also proved to be a source of tension and strain. At the beginning of the 20th century, writers like Jack London and F. Scott Fitzgerald depicted a lot of "have-not" characters whose fate is not a matter of free will. They are    8    by forces beyond their control. Often, in their works, children or young people are victimized by poverty that prevents them from    9    themselves. Convinced that a person's destiny is the result of his or her heredity interacting with the environment, they employ many    10     details to explore the oppressive world in which their characters are trapped. Analyzing characters' assumptions and values continued to illuminate the American experience.

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel written by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that follows a cast of characters living in the fictional town of West Egg on prosperous Long island in the summer of 1922. The story primarily     1     the young and mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and his crazy passion and obsession for the beautiful former lover Daisy Buchanan. Considered to be Fitzgerald's masterpiece, the Great Gatsby     2     themes of degradation, idealism,     3     to chance and social conflicts, creating     4     of the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties described as a warming tale     5     the American Dream.

Fitzgerald-     6     by the parties he had attended while visiting Long Island's north shore - began planning the novel in 1923, desiring to produce, in his words, "something new - something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and elaborately patterned." Progress was slow, with Fitzgerald completing his     7     following a move to the French Riviera in 1924. His editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt the book was vague and persuaded the author to revise over the next winter. Fitzgerald repeatedly hesitated about the book's title and he considered a variety of     8    , including titles that referenced the Roman character Trimalchi o; the title he was last documented to have desired was Under the Red, White and Blue.

First published in April 1925, the Great Gatsby received     9     reviews and sold 20,000 copies in its first year. Fitzgerald died in 1940, believing himself to be a failure and his work     10    . However, the novel experienced a revival during World War II, and became a part of American high school curricula and numerous stage and film adaptations in the following decades. Today, the Great Gatsby is widely considered to be a literary classic and a competitor for the title "Great American Novel".

Your body avoids overheating by taking advantage of a bit of physics: When water evaporates from a surface, it leaves the surface cooler. When your body gets too hot, it pumps water onto your skin and lets it evaporate, carrying away heat. This effect can actually     1     the temperature of your skin to below the air temperature. This allows humans to survive in places where the air temperature is as high as human body temperature - as long as we keep drinking water to produce more sweat.

If there's a lot of moisture in the air, then evaporation slows to a(n)    2    , because water condenses (凝结) onto your skin almost as fast as the moisture evaporates off it. When you feel sticky from sweat     3     on your skin, it means your body is struggling to evaporate water fast enough to keep you cool.

I asked Zachary Schlader, a researcher at Indiana University who studies how our bodies     4    extreme heat, about the hottest temperature a normal human could tolerate under ideal conditions. His 2014 study found that a person who is at rest, wearing     5     clothing, in a very dry room—10 percent relative humidity - and drinking water constantly could probably avoid overheating in temperatures as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46℃) .

The     6     factor for our heat tolerance is sweat—how quickly we can produce it and how quickly it evaporates. If you kept your skin wet with a steady     7     of water, and sat in front of a powerful fan, you could increase the evaporation rate and keep your skin cool in even higher temperatures.

Models of human thermoregulation like the one in the 2014 paper don't usually cover such extreme conditions, but I tried     8     their formulas to approximate what would happen under extreme evaporation and high wind. The results suggested that, with the help of a pool of water and a powerful fan, a human could conceivably tolerate heat of up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60℃) in air with 10 percent humidity.

That seemed awfully high, so I ran the number by Dr. Schlader. “Doing some    9    calculations, I come up with a similar number,” he said, “Honestly, I was surprised.” But, he added, these models are likely not reliable at such extremes. “I would     10     such findings with caution.”

In the British Museum on a Sunday afternoon, ancient faces look back at children and adults alike. Inside their glass cases, pharaohs (法老) and priests are     1     by the crowds. And crowds there always are, for these are painted coffins and carved masks of ancient Egyptians, relics (文物) of a culture that has     2     the world for thousands of years.

Ancient civilization is part of the world's heritage, and in recent times it seemed nothing could seriously threaten that     3    .Tourists visited such sites as Giza in Egypt and Olympia in Greece safe in the     4     knowledge that we were seeing wonders that would always be available to admire.

Yet the     5     of the world in 2012 is a threat to the apparently peaceful monuments of antiquity (古董) . In Greece, anxiety and alienation (疏远) as the weakest economy on the euro-zone faces terrible pressure to transform its way of life and a troubling reflection at Olympia last week, where a museum of the ancient Greek games was attacked by thieves. Perhaps this was     6    , but it is the second recent museum robbery in Greece.

Meanwhile in Egypt, tourism levels have decreased since the revolution, and hotels are half-empty.

This is where the word “tourism” becomes in itself harmful. People who visit Egypt to see ancient art are certainly tourists, in the country that was at the heart of the very idea of modern tourism. But this word has unfairly come to imply a selfish, shallow form of consumer spending,     7     valuable to poor countries but irrelevant to the higher concerns of national self-determination and democratic change.

To reduce the problems of the Egyptian tourists industry to these cold terms is wrong. Many people visit Egypt with a passionate     8     to gaze on the eyes of Tutankhamun and stand at the foot of the Great Pyramid. More     9    , the money from tourism helps keep Egyptian sites and museums going. To say these places are only of interest to “tourism” would be tragic and miserable.

Both Greece and Egypt are     10     of sites and objects of the highest importance to the entire world, if we shrug and write off (注销、报废) antiquity as the stuff of tourism and scholarship, “irrelevant” to these extraordinary times, we are already well on the way to barbarism (野蛮).