Read the following text and fill in the spaces with the vocabulary below.

Vocabulary: cautious, bumps, stilted, diverse, devil-may-care, repressed, aversion, nutritious remarkably, dashing, rites, succinctly, charming, prove, observations

Fox's curiosity about English behaviour, which she attempts to reduce, in this prodigiously long investigation, into key constituent parts, is matched only by her regret that we are not a more free and easy nationality. You gather that Fox and her fiancé Henry (both prominent figures in her research findings) prefer the ________ and riotous to the ________ and cautious behaviour which, her report claims, continues to dominate English social proceedings. For instance, we say "sorry" when someone else ________ into us, and take too much notice of queuing while pretending not to. But then, as well as being almost deranged with embarrassment, we are also "hypocrites". We are, in fact, "the most ________ and inhibited people on earth".

Since Fox is a leading social anthropologist, we must believe her when she tells us that our ________ of passage also leave a good deal to be desired. It "seems a shame", she says, "that there is no special ritual to mark the completion of secondary education". Maybe we're too mean to pay for them. Contemplating the ________ attitudes of young English people towards work and money, Fox professes herself "disappointed" to find them planning for the future and "not much cheered" to discover an early ________ to being in debt. This is not, you take it, Fox's recommended approach to being young, English and affluent. Where will it end, she frets, this "worrying trend" of "risk aversion and obsession with safety"? I don't know. Hull? Somewhere in the opposite direction from that other English trend of remortgaging and _________ credit-card spending?

Fox is happy to expose the working-class habit of saying things like "nuffink" and "serviette" along with other mannerisms more ________ summarised in Betjeman's "How to Get on in Society". Still, one day her exhaustive _________ on these "hidden" rules may ________ invaluable to visitors from another planet. They may not know that "M&S is a sort of department store", or realise that "some working class people... still believe in starting the day with a 'cooked breakfast'... this feast may often be eaten in a 'caff' rather than at home..."

Fox has worked so hard to be ________ and fun that she seems to lack the energy, or invention, that would be required to reconcile her theory of an inhibited and "dis-eased" nation with the evidence of increasingly unbuttoned, culturally ________ and unpredictable forms of Englishness. A good many of Fox's selected "English" traits - love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather - seem ________ similar to the French or German love of privacy, clubs, DIY and talking about the weather. But, as the author often reminds us, it's her book, and what interests her are "the causes of good behaviour". So what are these causes? "To be honest, I don't know why the English are the way we are - and nor, if they are being honest, does anyone else." Fanks for nuffink, as working-class people sometimes say, on finishing a generous but far from ________ feast of "social anthropology".

TASK 2 (5 Qs)

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