3 . A special delight for many book lovers is to open a cover to find a map secreted inside. It is filled with the details of land about to be ______. A writer’s map hints at a fully imagined world. At the beginning of a book, it’s a promise of what is to come. In the middle, it’s a guide through the fictional environment. And at the end, a map is a ______ of all the places the ______ has taken you to.

A new book, The Writer’s Map, contains dozens of ______ maps. Some were drawn by ______, while others were made by artists to ______ places that writers have ______ in their stories. “All maps are products of human ______,” say Huw Lewis-Jones, the book’s editor. “For some writers, making a map is absolutely ______ to shaping and telling their tale.”

The book features essays by authors and mapmakers, many of whom ______ Treasure Island, a novel about a magical treasure hunting ______ on the high seas. It contains one of the most well-known ______ in literature. The author first sketched the map in 1881 for his stepson. A red X ______ the place where the treasure was ______.

The ______ of Treasure Island inspired other writers to ______ maps in their own stories. This is an experience ______ shared by map-loving writers. For some writers, map making is a ______ way to pull themselves into their own work. “I always ______ my way into stories,” writes Abi Elphinstone, author of the Dreamsnatcher books. “I begin every story by drawing a map because it is only when my ______ start moving from place to place that a plot unfolds.”

4 . It did take me quite a while to start noticing Dr. Yuval Noah Harari’s well-received book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (人类简史). I bought the book after I heard Dou Wentao (a renowned TV host) mention it on his podcast, and to be frank, I read the first chapter with little _________. But it turned out to be the best book I read in 2017.

While I was immediately ___________ the book kept evolving as I read it. The book began with a brief introduction of the lives and activities of the earliest proto-humans (原始人)---Neanderthals (尼安德特人), Homoerectus (直立人) and early Homo Sapiens (智人)---and then _________ an examination of why it was the Homo sapiens, after hundreds of thousands of years of surviving but pretty much existing in the middle of the food chain, _________ rocketed to the top of it without any significant genetic changes, conquered multiple climates, and eventually domesticated the world around them from farm animals to crops. And Harari includes an interesting but fairly _________ argument about the true nature of our relationship to our most necessary crop---wheat.

Think for a moment about the _________ Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. All of a sudden, within just a few short millennia, it was growing everywhere.

So how did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous (到处存在的)? Wheat did it by manipulating (操纵) Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life _________ and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to _________ more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Then, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk _________ taking care of wheat plants.

However, the body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for cultivating wheat. Therefore human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle __________ next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not __________ wheat. It’s the other way around. One of the most important and sustained ideas running through the book is that what ultimately __________ Homo sapiens from all other creatures---other mammals, other apes, and even other “humans” like Neanderthals---was not our opposable thumbs or some other __________ standards, but instead it was our ability to generate (生成), believe in and act upon what Yuval Noah Narari calls “myths” or “__________” (essentially ideas and cultural institutions), particularly on a large scale and collective basis, which eventually transformed us from creatures that lived in small, loosely-organized groups (the typical feature of most apes) to our modern status.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a fascinating ambitious and difficult-to-summarize book that is also just highly __________. So as senior high school students, you won’t experience too much difficulty following the author’s train of thoughts. And I strongly recommend you to indulge (纵情于) yourself in this well-written book.

Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s mind-blowing book:

Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind

5 . I love a good murder mystery. It is so ___ to watch or read an exciting and interesting detective story and try to solve the ___ yourself. Agatha Christie is undoubtedly queen of the detective story considering she ___ over eighty books. Many people have fallen in love with her ___ — Hercule Poirot, a famous Belgian detective and Miss Marple, an old lady who is also an amateur ___.

As I am a big ___ of Agatha Christie, I was excited to ___her house in Devon called Greenway. I travelled to her ___ by steam train. We went through a dark tunnel and there was lots of smoke. It was a ___ setting for a murder like in her famous novel Murder on the Orient Express. ____, all the passengers arrived safely!

After a pleasant walk through the woods, I ____ the splendid house. I did a tour and I loved seeing where she wrote her books. Many first editions were ____ in a revolving (旋转的) bookcase. However, my   ____ part of the estate (庄园) was the boathouse. There was a lovely view of the river ____ the boathouse also served a more special purpose — inspiration for a crime ____. In the Poirot novel, Dead Man’s Folly, a girl’s body is ____ in the boathouse. They even ____ the TV adaptation of the book at Greenway.

I really ____ my visit to Greenway. It was such a ____ place and I was interested in seeing where Agatha Christie was ____ to write so many exciting stories.