INSTRUCTION: Answer question according to text.
TEXT
ARCHEOLOGY: Starting Out
When my longtime childhood ambition of becoming
a surgeon was derailed by the onset of adolescent
squeamishness – specifically, a dread of blood – I
turned to archeology. The sere, crumbly atmosphere of
[5] a dig, as I envisioned it, seemed a welcome relief from
the maelstrom I now perceived to be teeming within
the human body. This was ∈ the nineteen-seventies,
when archeology was a glamour profession.
I decided to take a year off before starting college and
[10] devote myself to salaried excavation ∈ exotic places. I
had grown up ∈San Francisco and had \left the United
States only for occasional family trips to Mexico. I’m
not sure which part of this vision most enthralled me:
myself prying human bones and lustrous vessels from
[15] the soil of Asia or Africa, or the forgotten lives I pictured
humming just _____ that soil, awaiting my discovery.
After weeks of anxiously checking the mail for job
offers and plane tickets, I received a single reply, from
a professor at Berkeley. His avuncular tone failed to
[20] entirely blunt the gist of his message: Our graduate
students pay us to come on digs. And you are not even
remotely qualified.
Stung, I turned to some of the small pay-to-participate
digs I’d seen advertised ∈ the newsletter. In September
[25] of 1980, as most of my high-school friends were
starting college, I shelled out two or three hundred
dollars plus airfare (my earnings from long hours
_____the counter of a Haight Street cafe) to join a
three-week dig ∈Kampsville, Illinois.
[30] The exoticism of Kampsville was not the sort I’d
craved. The real shock was the square metre of earth
– delineated by strings attached to pegs – that was the
extent of my archeological domain. We weren’t allowed
to sit on our squares, only to squat. Nor were we to
[35] dig on our dig, only to skim away fine layers of earth
with a scalpel, lowering the surface of our metre over
the course of days, until the objects embedded there
– projectile points or pottery shards – rested on top.
This soil-shaving took place ______ a scouring sun, ∈
[40] ninety-degree temperatures. By day two, I was craving
stewed prunes long before lunchtime. By day three,
I’d renounced my goal of becoming an archeologist.
Still, the archeology fantasy had been irrevocably
dispelled, and by October I was back at my cafe job
[45] with a fresh goal: save enough money to travel to
Europe. But my sojourn ∈Kampsville has stayed
with me – the sensation I had of scraping away the
layers ______ myself and a lost world, ∈ search of
its occupants.
Egan, Jennifer. The New Yorker 87.17 (Jun 13-Jun 20, 2011): n/a (adapted)
In the text, the word “squeamishness” (line 03) is related to a state of
