What is causing the number of people dining in restaurants to decrease？

A、A. Because he is a VIP of the restaurant.

B、B. Because he has reserved one.

C、C. Because he arrives with a foreigner.

D、D. Beacuse the restaurant is not popoular.

A、loophole

B、cornerstone

C、memorization

D、cultivating

The aim of education or culture is merely the development of good taste in knowledge and good form. in conduct. The cultured man or the ideal educated man is not necessarily one who is well-read or learned, but one who likes and dislikes the right things. To know what to love and what to hate is to have taste in knowledge. (81) I have met such persons, and found that there was no topic that might come up in the course of the conversation concerning which they did not have some facts or figures to produce, but whose points of view were appalling. Such persons have erudition (the quality of being knowledgeable), but no discernment or taste. Erudition is a mere matter of stuffing facts or information, while taste or discernment is a matter of artistic judgment. (82) In speaking of a scholar, the Chinese generally distinguish between a man's scholarship, conduct, and taste or discernment. This is particularly so with regard to historians; a book of history may be written with the most thorough scholarship, yet be totally lacking in insight or discernment, and in the judgment or interpretation of persons and events in history, the author may show no originality or depth of understanding. Such a person, we say, has no taste in knowledge. To be well-informed, or to accumulate facts and details, is the easiest of all things. (83) There are many facts in a given historical period that can be easily stuffed into our mind, but discernment in the selection of significant facts is a vastly more difficult thing and depends upon one's point of view.

An educated man, therefore, is one who has the right loves and hatreds. This we call taste, and with taste comes charm. (84) Now to have taste or discernment requires a capacity for thinking things through to the bottom, an independence of judgment, and an unwillingness to be knocked down by any form. of fraud, social, political, literary, artistic or academic. There is no doubt that we are surrounded in our adult life with a wealth of frauds: fame frauds, wealth frauds, patriotic frauds, political frauds, religious frauds and fraud poets, fraud artists, fraud dictators and fraud psychologists. When a psychoanalyst tells us that the performing of the functions of the bowels during childhood has a definite connection or that constipation leads to stinginess of character, all that a man with taste can do is to feel amused. (85) When a man is wrong, he is wrong, and there is no need for one to be impressed and overawed by a great name or by the number of books that he has read and we haven't.

(76)

To its fans, it is addictive. To the media, it is a promising money-maker. Sudoku, an old puzzle long popular in Japan is fast ga【66】popularity the world over. In Britain, a sudoku book is a bestseller and national newspapers are competing【67】(feverish) to publish the most, and the most fiendish, puzzles.【68】, the puzzle is being published in newspapers from Australia to Croatia to America. Even the New York Times is considering intr【69】sudoku in its Sunday magazine, alongside its venerated crossword.

The game's ap【70】is that its rules are as simple as its solution is complex. On a board of nine-by-nine sq【71】most of them empty, players must fill in each one【72】a number so that each row (left to right), column (top to bottom) and block (in bold lines)【73】1 to 9. Advanced ver【74】use bigger boards or add letters from the alphabet.

Sudoku--the Japanese word combines " number" and " single"--seems perfectly suited【75】modern times, a puzzle for an era when people are more nu【76】than literate. And like globalism itself, sudoku transcends borders by【77】(require) no translation.

The overall business of puzzles is hard to measure【78】revenues in America from magazines, syndicated newspaper sales, books, and online and phone services are almost $ 200m annually. The New York Times【79】millions of dollars a year from its crosswords and hundreds of thousands from a special phone service that provides hi【80】. Over 30,000 people pay $ 35 a year for the newspaper's e-mail version.

(61)

Everywhere we turn, we see the symbolic process at work. There are few things men do or want to do, possess or want to possess, that have not a symbolic value.

Almost all fashionable clothes are【47】______(high) symbolic, so is food. We【48】s______our furniture to serve as visible symbols of our taste, wealth, and social position. We often choose our houses on the【49】______of a feeling that it "looks well" to have a "good address. " We trade perfectly good cars in for【50】______(late) models not always to get better transportation, but to give evidence to the community that we can【51】______it.

Such complicated and apparently【52】______(use) behavior. leads philosophers to ask over and over again, ''why can't human beings live simply and naturally. " Often the complexity of human life makes us look enviously at the relative【53】sim______of such live as dogs and cats. Simply, the fact that symbolic process makes complexity possible is no reason for wanting to【54】______to a cat-and-dog existence. A better solution is to understand the symbolic process so that instead of being its slaves we become, to some degree at least, its【55】______ .

(36)

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life; the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

—Bertrand Russell in What I Have Lived For