You will hear a recording. Type the missing words in each blank.

There is such a thing as information (1) ___________. There is just so much information out there now that we can’t (2) ___________ with it or fully absorb it, or even decide which bits of it we want to keep in our minds, or which to (3) ___________. There is a similar thing going on with the range of choices we have as (4) ___________ . There is so much stuff out there, so much to choose from, that, according to some experts, this situation is making us (5) ___________. Most of us believe that the more we have to choose from the better, yet apparently our dissatisfaction with this wealth of choice, or rather the anxiety it produces, is part of a larger (6) ____________. It seems that, as society grows more (7) ___________ and people become freer to do what they want, the unhappier they become.

You will hear a recording. Type the missing words in each blank.

Post-modernism is broadly speaking a (1) __________ against the movement or the period, or perhaps simply the values and beliefs of, modernism. Most people, even those who seem to know what it is or was about, tend to define it in (2) ___________ terms by telling us what it isn’t, or doesn’t do. (3) __________ the term had a fairly limited application and referred to a new anti-modernist style of architecture. But it spread like a virus to include almost all aspects of (4) ____________ culture. One thing we can be sure about is that it wanted to get rid of what were called the grand narratives by which we explained bow the world – and history – got us from the past to the present. Another feature of post-modernism is its belief that truth and reality are human-centered and (5) ____________ . That is, the primary (6) ___________ of truth in the present age is the self. This, I believe, has now all passed and been thrown in the rubbish bin of history. Yet it is difficult to know whether the age of information technology confirms the passing of post-modernism or is a consequence of it.