1 . On the mantelpiece is a sign saying “A home is not a home without a dog”. Next to it, in the couple’s living room, is a framed picture of a dog, which is itself nestled among ________ dog decorations. The kitchen, where Laura Jacques and Richard Remde’s four dogs ________ play and rest, is similarly decorated. Upstairs is the couple’s super king size bed, roomy enough to ________ two humans and four dogs.

Visitors to this house in Silsden, West Yorkshire are left in no doubt about the ________ of dogs in the couple’s lives. Their four dogs will soon become six, when they bring home two more cloned dogs.

Jacques works as a dog-walker. She has studied dog ________ and has spent a lot of time volunteering at the Dogs Trust. The couple have just moved into a new house, one they bought because it has a lot of land for the dogs to run around in. One corner has been ________ as a pet graveyard. Dylan, their eight-year-old dog who died earlier this year is to take the first ________.

When Jacques received the news from the vet that Dylan had died, she ________ in shock and grief. “I couldn’t comprehend that the worst possible thing had happened. I was just in total shock,” she says. “And then an idea occurred to me – I want to clone Dylan.”

The couple say they know how ________ pet cloning is and that some will criticize them for “playing God”. But they ________ that they are doing nothing wrong. “We have helped to make a scientific ________,” says Jacques. “Arguably dog breeders are doing something ________ but they are doing it for money while we aren’t. I can understand the ________ around human cloning – creating beings that don’t have a real mum or dad – but the same thing doesn’t apply to dogs. I know that some people will disagree with what we’ve done but I hope they won’t ________ us.”

They accept that some people will say they are mad and wonder why they are spending $100,000 on the ________. “We are not mad,” says Remde, “We are dog-mad though, and we both absolutely love all animals.”

2 . Stephen Hawking remembered by his research student

Stephen was not so famous when I began my PhD at Cambridge in 1972, but his brilliance was already clear to his peers. On becoming his research student, I found it rather discouraging when I was informed by one of my tutors that Stephen was the brightest person in the department. ___________, it soon became evident that my relationship with him would not be the usual type of supervisor-student relationship. In those days, before he had his caretakers’ group of nurses and assistants, students would necessarily have to help him in various ways___________ his disability. This was not an tough task, but it did mean that my relationship with him became quite ___________. Indeed, I shared an office with him, lived with his family for a while and ___________ him as he travelled around the world, giving talks and collecting medals.

I soon discovered some of Stephen’s unique ___________. The first, of course, was that he was very smart. Students are probably always in respect of their supervisors and with Stephen the respect was even greater. Indeed, on matters of physics, I always regarded him as an oracle(圣人), just a few words from him generating insights that would have taken weeks to___________on my own. However, Stephen was only human and not all encounters led to inspiration. Once I asked a question about something that was ___________ me. He thought about it silently. His eyes then closed and I was even more impressed with myself because he was clearly having to think about it very deeply. Only after some time did it become clear that he had fallen asleep. Nowadays, I also sometimes fall asleep while talking to students, so I recall this incident with ___________.

I also learned about Stephen’s stubbornness and ___________ to continue doing things for himself as long as possible, despite the continuous progress of his illness. For example, because he had an office in both the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics and the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge, I also had offices in both places. I recall that he sometimes gave me a lift (probably illegally!) between the two places in his three-wheeled invalid car. I found this rather ____________ because I thought he drove faster than was safe. Later, he had to discontinue the use of the car but he never lost his drive and the desire to travel as far and wide as possible. One ____________ is he didn’t live long enough to achieve his dream of going into space.

I’m often asked where Stephen stands in the pantheon(名流群) of great physicists. There are many ways of being a great physicist and they cannot be ____________ like runners in an Olympic race. Stephen himself never ____________ to have the status of Newton or Einstein, but I strongly disagree with people who suggest that his scientific contributions have been ____________ because of his symbolic status. His disability was clearly a factor in his becoming so famous, but I doubt any other ____________ physicist will achieve the honor of being buried next to Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey after his death.