THE LIFE OF A COUNTRY VET
Don Strange, who works as a vet in northern England, leads a busy life. As well as having to treat pets
(34) _____ are unwell, he often visits farms where problems of various kinds await him. He has lost count of the number of times he has been called out at midnight to give (35) _____ to a farmer with sick sheep or cows. Recently, a television company chose Don as the (36) _____ of a documentary programme it was making about the life of a country vet. The programme showed the difficult situations Don (37) _____ every day, such as helping a cow to give birth, or winning the trust of an aggressive dog which needs an injection. Not all of Don's patients are domestic animals, (38) _____, and in the programme, people saw him helping an owl which had a damaged wing.

One of the most popular literary figures in American literature is a woman who spent almost half of her long life in China, a country on a continent thousands of miles from the United States. In her lifetime she earned this country's most highly acclaimed literary award: the Pulitzer Prize, and also the most prestigious form of literary recognition in the world, the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pearl S. Buck was almost a household word throughout much of her lifetime because of her prolific literary output, which consisted of some eighty-five published works, including several dozen novels, six collections of short stories, fourteen books for children, and more than a dozen works of nonfiction. When she was eighty years old, some twenty-five volumes were awaiting publication. Many of those books were set in China, the land in which she spent so much of her life. Her books and her life served as a bridge between the cultures of the East and the West. As the product of those two cultures, she became as she described herself "mentally bifocal." Her unique background made her into an unusually interesting and versatile human being.
As we examine the life of Pearl Buck, we cannot help but be aware that we are incling three separate people: a wife and mother, an internationally famous writer and a humanitarian and philanthropist. One cannot really get to know Pearl Buck without learning about each of the three. Though honored in her lifetime with the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in addition to the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Pearl Buck as a total human being, not only a famous author, is a captivating subject of study.

Mike Rutzen has one of the most thrilling occupations you could possibly imagine. He is an expert in the secrets and behaviour of one of the most powerful and feared natural predators on the plant, the great white shark. Once a fisherman who was scared of this mysterious animal, Mike has learnt to admire and understand great whites, and now, he spends a large part of his time in their company. Mike's passion for sharks goes beyond the limits of most sharks experts, though. Believe it or not, Mike doesn't simply observe sharks in a tank or in the oceans; he actually pets them, plays with them and even hypnotises them. He has developed such a special bond with sharks that he is known as the Sharkman.
Rutzen is not a scientist. In actual fact, he taught himself everything he knows about sharks. He was brought up on a farm in the South African countryside and knew nothing about sharks until he started working as a fisherman off the coast of Gansbaai, a fishing village near Cape Town. As tourism developed in the area, there arose a need for experienced boat skippers to take giant fish and developed a very close relationship with them. He took lessons in freediving so he could swim with sharks and he slowly learnt how to interpret their behaviour and adapt his posture to avoid being attacked.
Mike's interest in sharks doesn't end there, though. He has set himself the goal of changing the negative perception that so many people have of great white sharks. “They may be the top predator in the sea, but they are not the man-eating killers of our nightmares” he says. The Sharkman has become a great champion of shark conservation, seeking to highlight the great white shark's status as an endangered species and to raise awareness of the need to protect them. He regularly travels to give talks and lecturers on the great white shark and he also makes documentaries about them. In Sharkman, a Discovery Channel programme, he tours the world and dives with different species of sharks, demonstrating his ability to hypnotise them. He also starred in an episode of the BBC's Natural World. He not only has an exciting and rewarding job, but he is also, as is stated by the title of another BBC programme: A living legend of Gansbaai.