Table tennis started as an after-dinner game, but is now a fast, high-tech sport. It also has     1     most players of any sport in the world.

    2     is believed that upper-class Victorians in England invented table tennis in the 1880s as an after-dinner alternative (可能的选择) to tennis,     3     (use) whatever they could find as equipment. A line of books would often be the net, and sometimes a cigarette box cover would be a racket.

In 1926, at a meeting     4     (hold) in Berlin, the International Table Tennis Federation was formed. The first World Championships were held in London in the same year, but the sport had to wait a long time before it was given a chance     5     (make) its first appearance at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.

The sport     6     (progress) greatly since it was first invented. Nowadays, players use     7     (special) developed rackets and a lightweight, hollow (空心的) ball. Thanks to their high-tech rackets, they can now enjoy the     8     (magic) feeling of hitting the ball at over 150 kilometres per hour!

Over the years, table tennis has developed into a worldwide sport. There are perhaps 40 million competitive table tennis players and countless millions     9     play less seriously. Hopefully, table tennis     10     (play) by more people all over the world in the future.

4 . Ireland has had a very difficult history. The problems started in the 16th century when English rulers tried to vanquish Ireland. For hundreds of years, the Irish people fought against the English. Finally, in 1921, the British government was forced to give independence to the south of Ireland. The result is that today there are two “Irelands”. Northern Ireland, in the north, is part of the United Kingdom. The Republic of Ireland, in the south, is an independent country.

In the 1840s the main crop, potatoes, was affected by disease and about 750,000 people died of hunger. This, and a shortage of work, forced many people to leave Ireland and live in the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada. As a result, the population fell from 8.2 million in 1841 to 6.6 million in 1851.

For many years, the majority of Irish people earned their living as farmers. Though many people still follow the routine nowadays, more and more people are moving to the cities to work in factories and offices. Life in the cities is very different from life in the countryside, where things move at a quieter and slower pace.

The Irish are famous for being warm-hearted and friendly. Oscar Wilde, a famous Irish writer, once said that the Irish were “the greatest talkers since the Greeks”. Since independence, Ireland has revived (复兴) its own culture of music, language, literature and singing. Different areas have different styles of old Irish songs which are sung without instruments. Other kinds of Irish music use many different instruments such as the violin, whistles, etc.

The Silk Road is in fact a relatively recent term.These ancient roads had no particular name until in the mid­nineteenth century; Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen     1    (name) the trade and communication network the Silk Road. Since then the term     2    (accept) globally.

In the nineteenth century, a new type of travelers stepped onto the Silk Road: archaeologists and geographers, enthusiastic explorers who were eager     3    (look) for adventure.Researchers who came from many countries traveled through the Taklamakan Desert,    4     is now in Xinjiang, to explore ancient sites along the Silk Road,    5    (lead) to many discoveries and studies, and most of all, a renewed interest     6    the history of these routes.

Today，many historic     7    (build) and monuments still stand, marking the passage of the Silk Road through hotels, ports and cities. What’s more, the long­standing legacy (遗产) of this remarkable network is reflected in     8     large number of cultures, languages, customs and religions that have developed for many years along these routes. The passage of merchants and travelers of many     9    (difference) nationalities resulted not only in commercial exchange, but in a widespread and continual process of cultural interaction.    10    (obvious), it has become a driving force in the formation (形成) of diverse societies.

Some time after 10,000 BC, people made the first real attempt to control the world they lived     1     , through agriculture. Over thousands of years, they began to depend less on     2     could be hunted or gathered from the wild, and more on animals they had raised and crops they had sown.

Farming produced more food per person     3     hunting and gathering, so people were able to raise more children. And，as more children were born, more food     4    (need). Agriculture gave people their first experience of the power of technology     5    (change) lives.

By about 6000 BC，people     6     (discover)the best crops to grow and animals to raise. Later，they learned to work with the     7     (season)，planting at the right time and, in dry areas,     8     (make) use of annual floods to irrigate (灌溉) their fields.

This style of farming lasted for quite a long time. Then，with     9     rise of science, changes began. New methods     10     (mean) that fewer people worked in farming. In the last century or so, these changes have accelerated. New power machinery and artificial fertilizers (化肥) have now totally transformed a way of life that started in the Stone Age.

9 . Miep Gies, the woman who hid the Dutch girl Anne Frank’s diary from the Nazis to become one of the world’s most-read books, died after a brief illness at the age of 100.

It was Gies who guarded Anne’s diary, and presented it to the girl’s father, Otto, when he returned from the Auschwitz concentration camp(奥斯威辛集中营) at the end of World War Ⅱ—the only one of his family to survive.

In her diary, Anne Frank wrote about her teenage life hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944, when the Nazi police discovered her and her family’s hiding place. The diary, first published in 1947, has been translated into 70 languages.

Anne Frank expressed a great wish to live on after her death. Miep Gies saw it as her duty to help in making this happen.

Born in Vienna in 1909, Gies moved to the Netherlands at the age of 11. In 1933, she began working for Otto Frank at his trading company. At great risk to her own safety, she and four other helpers brought food and supplies to the Frank family hiding in a secret office building for more than two years.

When she turned 100, Gies tried to play down her own role. “I’m not a hero,” she said. “It wasn’t something I planned in advance. I simply did what I could to help.”

Every day she received letters from all over the world with questions about her relationship with Anne Frank and her role as a helper. Gies received many honors for her role, including from the Netherlands, Germany and Israel.

10 . Have you ever wondered why people drive on a different side of the road? It might seem bizarre that U. K. Drivers stay on the left, but they’re not the only ones. Around 35 percent of the world population do the same, including people in Ireland, Japan, and some Caribbean islands.

Originally, almost everybody traveled on the left side of the road. However their way of transport was quite different from today: Think about four legs instead of four wheels. For Medieval swordsmen on horseback, it made sense to keep to the left to have their right arms closer to their enemies. Getting on or off was also easier from the left side of the horse, and safer done by the side of the road than in the center.

So why did people stop traveling on the left? Things changed in the late 1700s when large wagons (货车) pulled by several pairs of horses were used to transport farm products in France and the United States. The wagon driver sat behind the left horse, with his right arm free to use his whip to keep the horses moving. Since he was sitting on the left position, he wanted other wagons to pass on his left, so he kept to the right side of the road.

The British Government refused to give up their left-hand driving ways, and in 1773 introduced the General Highways Act, which encouraged driving on the left. This was later made law thanks to The Highway Act of 1835.

When Henry Ford showed his Model T in 1908, the driver’s seat was on the left, meaning that cars would have to drive on the right hand side of the road to allow front and back passengers to exit the car onto the roadside. However, British drivers remain on the left, and this is highly unlikely to change.