B完型填空

第十一篇 On the Net Friends Come and Go, Talking of... (B级) The young woman was visibly upset and clearly wmated to get something off her chest. “What’s up?” I inquired. “I’ve just been defriended,” she said. Now "defriended" is a word with which I am not familiar. I have been befriended by and befriended - many people since arriving in Beijing. But defriended? It turns out this is a new word created by the Interact-savvy younger generation specifically in relation to the worldwide social networking phenomenon, Facebook. Those who join can invite friends to become members of the site, too .They can then share photographs, "chat", swap messages and observations and perform a host of other mutually accessible applications. I've seen some people's sites boasting hundreds of friends, all moments away down a fiber optic cable, providing they are logged on to their computers or hooked up to a high-spec cell phone. It creates the possibility of "befriending" 'anyone in the world who has online access. Currently, Facebook has 150 million users. That means there's a lot of "friends" out there. The downside is that you can be "defriended" - you can be denied access to the Face, book site someone who had previously invited to be his or her friend. And you can do it without the potential for instant recrimination. Where once, in the school playground on child might have petulantly shouted at another, "I'm not going to be your fried any more" now the same hurt and loss of face can be performed remotely with the chick of a button. A controversial aspect of "defriending" is that, unlike with other applications such as the "what are you thinking about?" posting a digital depository of the often dire, dreary , dull and desperate, no message is sent out alerting you or your contacts about the change m status. You only find out you have been dumped when you try to visit a "friend's" site, and you find you can no longer get in. the delay of the discovery is all too often doubly hurtful. Just as bombs are dispatched impersonally against an unseen enemy in modem warfare, so relationships are blown out of the window with the same callous disregard, without the risk of any face-to-face comeback. One second you arc there, the next you are deleted. 第十二篇 How a Terrible Battle helped to Change Europe(B级) Ninety years ago on a sunny morning in Northern France, something happened that changed Britain and Europe for ever. At half past seven on the morning of July 1, 1916, whistles blew and thousands of British soldiers left their positions to attack their German enemies. By the end of the day, 20,000 of them were dead, and another 30,000 wounded or missing. The Battle of the Somme, as it is called, lasted for six months1. When it ended, 125,000 British soldiers were dead. They had gained five kilometers of ground. This was one of a series of great battles during the WWI. The attack on the Somme was staged to relieve pressure on the French, who were engaged in a great battle of their own at a place called Verdun. By the time the battle ended, over a million French and German troops had been killed. About 17 million people were killed in WWI. There have been wars with greater numbers of dead. But there has never been one where most of the dead were concentrated in such a small area. On the Somme battlefield, two men died for every meter of space. Local farmers working in the land still find the bodies of those who died in that battle. The dead of all nations were buried in a series of giant graveyards along the line of the border between France and Belgium. Relatives and descendants of those who died still visit these graveyards today. What the French call the "tourism of death" makes an important contribution to the local economy. It took a second great conflict before Europe was to turn against war itself. Twenty-eight years after the Somme battle, a liberating army of British. American and Canadian troops took back France from another German invasion. More than 500,000 people were killed. New graveyards were built. Two great conflicts across two generations helped to change the European mind about war. Germany, once the most warlike country in Europe, is now probably more in favor of peace than any other. One major cause of war in Europe was rivalry between France and Germany. The European Union was specifically formed to end that rivalry According to US commentator William Pfaff, "Europeans are interested in a slow development of civilized and tolerant international relations, compromising on problems while avoiding catastrophes along the way. They have themselves only recently recovered from the catastrophes of the WWI and WWII, when tens of millions of people were destroyed. They don't want more " The last British veteran of the Somme battle died in 2005, aged 108. And the WWI is passing out of memory and into history2. But for anyone who wants to understand how Europeans think , it is still important to know a little about the terrible events of July 1, 1916.