At a certain age, you may feel as if you’re still at life’s beginning yet also disturbingly close to the end. You feel _______ that there’s much left to do. You were going to win an Oscar, pick up a Nobel Prize in physics and get elected president, _______ you haven’t even gotten around to auditioning (试镜) for a film, taking a university physics course or brushing up on your _______.
It’s almost enough to make you want to live forever. But then isn’t the real goal a life hugely increased not so much in _______ as in width? A life during which it’s likely to pursue every one of a wide range of _______?
It’s true. If you were immortal (永生的), you might eventually get to be a philosopher and a cantor and an actor and a psychoanalyst and a novelist. But don’t forget: over the vastly _______ period, life would certainly not cease exposing you to _______ further of choices. When you finally entered psychoanalytic training in 2100, you’d have to _______ any number of other new possibilities that might at that instant _______ themselves, such as joining an “expedition to Alpha Centauri, or learning to create art with the previously ________ colors recently made visible on the spectrum. You might have crossed one possibility off our list, but you’d have ________ three more. For each new path you took, there would be several ________ that you’d have to leave for later. Hundreds of years in, you’d still as though you’d ________ moved beyond the opening stages of what life has to offer.
Many activities you once loved, meanwhile, would fall out of fashion or ________. As an aging mortal, your knees might make it tough to run a marathon, causing you to ________all the healthy racers. As ________ youthful immortal, by contrast, you might remain fit to run marathons over the centuries. But perhaps the beloved urban races of your youth would have long since disappeared, ________ because of impossibly hot global temperatures and the fact that future civilizations find interplanetary relays ________exciting. All of the things you once did have shelf lives. The ________you live, the more of them die, increasing the weight of the time that has flowed through your fingers.
Many of us 60- and 70-somethings will remember George Burn’s words: Old age isn’t great but it sure beats the alternative. It’s also true that ________ isn’t great, but it sure beats the alternative.
16. A.accurately | B.acutely | C.adequately | D.actively |
17. A.though | B.otherwise | C.but | D.for |
18. A.acting | B.science | C.marathon | D.politics |
19. A.depth | B.height | C.length | D.weight |
20. A.coincidences | B.possibilities | C.realities | D.experience |
21. A.excluded | B.extended | C.exchanged | D.expected |
22. A.already | B.ever | C.still | D.almost |
23. A.give up | B.take on | C.let out | D.come up |
24. A.repeat | B.represent | C.preserve | D.present |
25. A.unbearable | B.unforgettable | C.unimaginable | D.unnecessary |
26. A.added | B.adopted | C.invented | D.ignored |
27. A.another | B.the other | C.none | D.others |
28. A.actually | B.hardly | C.mostly | D.nearly |
29. A.out of shape | B.out of control | C.out of question | D.out of reach |
30. A.encourage | B.approve | C.envy | D.blame |
31. A.permanently | B.personally | C.potentially | D.purposefully |
32. A.banned | B.boomed | C.restored | D.reserved |
33. A.anything but | B.far more | C.other than | D.still less |
34. A.shorter | B.longer | C.wider | D.later |
35. A.future | B.youth | C.death | D.birth |