Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
Nellie Bly races around the world
Nellie Bly was one of the best-known journalists in the United States. Throughout her career, she was always determined to do something 1 hadn’t been done by any girl before.
Bly focused her early work for the Pittsburgh Dispatch (匹兹堡电讯报) on the lives of working women, 2 (write) a series of articles on women factory workers. However, the newspaper soon received complaints from factory owners, and she was reassigned to cover fashion, society, and gardening, and she quickly became dissatisfied. She then traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent (驻外记者), 3 (spend) nearly half a year reporting on the lives and customs of the Mexican people. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly’s report, they threatened her 4 arrest, causing her to escape from the country.
Safely home, she left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887. After four months, she took on an undercover (秘密的) assignment to investigate an asylum (精神病院) in New York from a newspaper, the New York World. After exposing conditions inside the asylum in her exposé Ten Days in a Mad-House, she became a famous person and, as a result, she needed a good follow-up. In the summer of 1888, she picked up Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. 5 (finish) reading it, she knew what she was going to do next.
At first, people laughed at her claim that she could beat Phileas Fogg’s fictional 80-day record. “In the first place you are a woman 6 would need a protector,” she was told, “and even if it were possible for you to travel alone, you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain (耽搁) you from being able to make rapid changes.” 7 (not want) to give up, she worked hard to persuade the New York World, 8 eventually agreed to sponsor (赞助) her.
A year later, at 9.40 on the morning of 14 November 1889, Nellie started her journey, 9 (bring) only the clothes she was wearing — a sensible dress and thick overcoat. But she carried most of her money around her neck. The newspaper had issued her£200 English pounds, the equivalent of at least f 100,000 today.
As Bly travelled east, the newspaper breathlessly reported her progress. Readers were invited 10 (guess) the exact time she would return; hundreds of thousands of entries poured in. At 3:51 on the afternoon of 25 January 1890, her train pulled into Jersey City. Nellie had done it-and it had taken her just 72 days.