The Amber Room was made of several tons of amber. The amber which    1    (select ) had a beautiful yellow-brown colour like honey. The design of the room was in the fancy style popular in those days. It was also a treasure decorated with gold and jewels,     2    took the country's best artists about ten years     3     (make).

The Amber Room was designed for the palace of Frederick I.     4    , the next King of Prussia Frederick William I, to whom the Amber Room belonged, decided not to keep it. In 1716 he gave     5     to Peter the Great.     6     return, the Czar sent him a troop of his best soldiers. So the Amber Room became part of the Czars winter palace in St Petersburg.

Later, Catherine II had the Amber Room     7    (move )to a palace outside St Petersburg where she spent her summers. She told her artists to add more details to it. In 1770 the room was completed the way she wanted. Almost six hundred candles lit the room and its mirrors and pictures shone like gold.    8    (lucky), although the Amber Room was considered one of the    9     (wonder)of the world, it is now    10    (miss).

When digging outside the city walls, researchers     1     (discover) thirty to forty bodies lying one on top of another. They had been murdered.

The men dug with great care, trying not to disturb the       2    (evident) of what had happened. Everyone was curious     3    why all these people had been killed at the same time. Was it just     4     coincidence?

Deep in the ground below the bodies, they found a tomb     5     was made of stone. It contained many valuable things,     6     (include) much gold and many jewels. Inside it lay the body of a man that was     7     (good) preserved. It was clear that the man had been a king,     8     explained why the other bodies were there. The workers who had built the tomb were killed shortly after the king     9     (die). That was because they wanted to keep the tomb a secret, and to make     10     (they) companions for him in death.

3 . The Battle of Chancellorsville, one of the most famous battles of the Civil War, took place in Virginia in the spring of 1863. For months, the two armies had been staying on opposite banks of a narrow river. The Confederate(南方联盟) troops were led by perhaps     1     (honored) military tactician(战略家) in American history, General Robert E. Lee. The Union (北方联盟)soldiers were led by “Fighting” Joe Hooker.

In appearance, personality, and lifestyle, these men were nearly perfect opposites. Lee, an older man in poor health with a gray beard, had a solemn, measured character. Hooker was a blond, broad-shouldered young man     2     pride over his appearance was but one aspect of his self-centeredness. Whereas Lee was loyal and principled, Hooker was known for his rollicking enjoyment of both women and whiskey.

Despite the fact that the Confederacy     3     (win) the last four major battles and the Union soldiers were starving,     4     (exhaust), and demoralized, Hooker proclaimed, “My plans are perfect. And when I start to carry them out,     5     God have mercy on Bobby Lee, for I shall have none.” Why was Hooker so confident?

Hooker had used spies, analysts, and even hot air balloons to compile a vast amount of intelligence about Lee’s army. He had already been aware, for example,     6     Lee had only 61,000 men to Hooker’s own 134,000. Supported by his superior numbers, Hooker secretly moved 70,000 of his men fifteen miles up and across the river, and then ordered them to sneak back down to position themselves     7     Lee’s army. In effect, Hooker had cut off the Confederate soldiers in front and behind. They were trapped. Satisfied with his advantage, Hooker became convinced that Lee’s only option was to retreat to Richmond, thus     8     (assure) a Union victory.

Yet Lee, despite his disadvantages of both numbers and position, did not retreat. Instead, he moved his troops into position to attack. Union soldiers who tried to warn Hooker that Lee was on the offensive     9     (dismiss) as cowards. Having become convinced that Lee had no choice but     10     (retreat), Hooker began to ignore reality. When Lee’s army attacked the Union soldiers at 5:00 p.m., they were eating supper, completely unprepared for battle. They abandoned their rifles and fled as Lee’s troops came shrieking out of the brush, bayonets drawn. Against all odds, Lee won the Battle of Chancellorsville, and Hooker’s forces withdrew in defeat.

Woodblock printing first appeared in the early Tang period. During the Song dynasty, the technique of block printing was very advanced. Books were     1    (beautiful) printed. Even today the books     2    (print) at the time are valuable and treasured by libraries and book collectors.

However, block printing     3    (be) not very convenient. Every two pages of a book had to be carved on a woodblock, and a big book would require many blocks. Besides, there had to be large places for storing the books.     4     (overcome) these shortcomings, Bi Sheng invented the movable type during the years between 1041 and 1048. One word was carved on one piece of clay,     5     was hardened with fire. Then clay characters were set on     6     iron plate according to the text of a book. Then ink was applied to them and     7    (sheet) of paper spread over them, and the printing was done. Bi Sheng’s invention made printing faster and     8    (easy) than before. Later, movable type of metal and wood was made and widely used.

The technique of printing was gradually known to other Asian countries and Europe. The great influence printing had     9    the advance of civilization is too clear to need any     10    (explain).

In 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay succeeded       1     climbing to the top of Mount Everest, at 11:30 am, on May 29. They were the first people     2    (reach) the top of Mount Everest.

Edmund Hilary was a New Zealand mountaineer,     3     (explore) and philanthropist (慈善家)，and Tenzing Norgay was a Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer. Both of them were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest     4     (lead) by John Hunt in 1953. For this expedition, Hunt selected a group of people who were     5     (experience) in climbing mountains in the whole British Empire. In the group, Edmund Hilary    6     (select) from New Zealand, and Tensing Norgay was actually recruited (招收) from India where he lived. Before climbing, the expedition had been organized and planned for months. They made nine camps on their way up, some of     7       have been still used by climbers up to now.

In fact, the first team made     8     to the place which was just 300 feet below the summit,     9     they left on May 26. They actually had already reached the point that no man had reached before. They were forced to leave because of the bad weather and because there were     10     (problem) with their oxygen tanks.