The Vikings, whose ancestors came from Scandinavia, were the first Europeans     1    (reach) America. They had lived in many places of northern Europe. In 982 AD, a man     2    (call) Eric the Red was forced to leave Iceland because of a murder, for     3    he got into trouble. Eric discovered Greenland and persuaded some people     4    (settle) in Greenland. Eric set sail again, but only half of the ships made     5    to Greenland this time.

Later a man, Biarni set sail from Iceland in search     6     Eris’s party. But he     7    (blow) off course and found himself in an unknown land, from where he     8    (eventual) reached Greenland.

In the year 1002, Leif, Eric the Red’s son, followed Biarni’s directions and sailed to     9    is believed to be the coast of present-day Canada. He also discovered Newfoundland. Actually, Eric the Red and Leif’s     10    (deed) are the first records we have of Europeans sailing to the Americas.

3 . Sometimes it’s hard to let go. For many British people, that can apply to institutions and objects that represent their country’s past-age-old castles, splendid homes… and red phone boxes.

Beaten first by the march of technology and lately by the terrible weather in junkyards (废品场), the phone boxes representative of an age are now making something of a comeback. Adapted in imaginative ways, many have reappeared on city streets and village greens housing tiny cafes, cellphone repair shops or even defibrillator machines (除颤器).

The original iron boxes with the round roofs first appeared in 1926. They were designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of the Battersea Power Station in London. After becoming an important part of many British streets, the phone boxes began disappearing in the 1980s, with the rise of the mobile phone sending most of them away to the junkyards.

About that time, Tony Inglis’ engineering and transport company got the job to remove phone boxes from the streets and sell them out. But Inglis ended up buying hundreds of them himself, with the idea of repairing and selling them. He said that he had heard the calls to preserve the boxes and had seen how some of them were listed as historic buildings.

As Inglis and, later other businessmen, got to work, repurposed phone boxes began reappearing in cities and villages as people found new uses for them. Today, they are once again a familiar sight, playing roles that are often just as important for the community as their original purpose.

In rural areas, where ambulances can take a relatively long time to arrive, the phone boxes have taken on a lifesaving role. Local organizations can adopt them for l pound, and install defibrillators to help in emergencies.

Others also looked at the phone boxes and saw business opportunities. LoveFone, a company that advocates repairing cellphones rather than abandoning them, opened a mini workshop in a London phone box in 2016.

The tiny shops made economic sense, according to Robert Kerr, a founder of LoveFone. He said that one of the boxes generated around $13,500 in revenue a month and cost only about $400 to rent.

Inglis said phone boxes called to mind an age when things were built to last. “I like what they are to people, and I enjoy bringing things back,” he said.

4 . It is sometimes thought that the longing for material goods, the need to buy things, is a relatively modern invention.     1     Trade or shopping is certainly an ancient desire, and existed before our ancestors invented writing, laws, cities or farming, even before they used metal to make tools.

Humans are born to trade.     2     Evidence from hunter-gatherers suggests that the exchange of food and other necessary things comes naturally, as well as the ability to keep a record of the credits involved. And once trade begins, the benefits are hard to resist.

Ancient local coastal people in northern Australia traded fish hooks, along a chain of trading partners, with people living 400 miles inland, who cut and polished local stone to make axes (斧子).     3     Finally, both groups of “producers”, by concentrating on things they could produce and exchanging them for other things they needed, benefited as a result.

Trade in the necessities of life, such as food and simple tools, is not really surprising, considering the link between these basic items and survival. What is surprising, though, is that our taste for unnecessary expensive objects also goes back a long way.

In South Africa, 100,000-year-old decorative dyes (染料) have been found in an area where none were produced.     4     Small round pieces of glass 76,000 years old were also found at the same place. The earliest jewellery known to us were not just random findings — they were grouped together in size and had holes like those used for threading onto a necklace.

Archaeologists argue that trade prepared the way for the complex societies in which we live today.     5     However, their modern equivalents — fast cars and expensive clothes — hold the same attraction for us as “trade goods” did for people 100,000 years ago.