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 in 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 in exotic places. I
had grown up in 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 in 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 in 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, in
[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 in Kampsville has stayed
with me – the sensation I had of scraping away the
layers ______ myself and a lost world, in search of
its occupants.
Egan, Jennifer. The New Yorker 87.17 (Jun 13-Jun 20, 2011): n/a (adapted)
INSTRUCTION: Answer question considering the words that correctly and respectively complete the blanks in lines 16, 28, 39, and 48.
According to the text, the words that fit in the blanks are
