1. | A happy comeback | 2. | Dangerous when rare | 3. | Recovery of a masterpiece | 4. | Back and deep into the past |
| | 5. | Return of the popularity | 6. | From Eastern to Western culture | 7. | They come back in spring | 8. | Return to the market |
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| A. | The Mona Lisa, also known as La Giaconda, became world famous after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911. The painting was missing for two years before police traced the theft to Italian painter, Vincenzo Peruggia, who stole the work to return it to its country of origin. The Louvre Museum in Paris built a separate room to house the Mona Lisa, giving up to five million visitors a year the chance to see the painting. | B. | The tradition of telling stories with a series of sequential images has been a part of Japanese culture long before Superman comic strips. The earliest examples of pre-manga artwork that influenced the development of modern Japanese comics are commonly attributed to Toba Sojo, an 11th-century painter-priest with an odd sense of humor. Toba’s animal paintings satirized life in the Buddhist priesthood by drawing priests as rabbits or monkeys engaged in silly activities. | C. | When the story in which Holmes died was published in a popular magazine in 1893, the British reading public was outraged. More than 20,000 people canceled their subscriptions. The demand for Holmes stories was so great that Conan Doyle brought the great detective back to life by explaining that no one had actually seen Holmes go down the Reichenbach Falls. The public, glad to have new tales, bought the explanation. | D. | Caviar refers to the salted eggs of the fish species, sturgeon. At the beginning of the 19th century, the United States was one of the greatest producers of caviar in the world. Because of overfishing, commercial sturgeon harvesting was banned. Today, mostly through farm-raised varieties, caviar production has returned in America. Some American caviar is very high in quality and has been compared favorably to wild Caspian caviar. | E. | T.S. Eliot wrote in his poem, "The Waste Land," that April was the "cruelest month." He was living in England at the time, and the weather there can be dreadfully rainy and cold during spring. But from a cook's point of view, April is anything but cruel. The month brings us some of the freshest, most wonderful foods. Consider the first ripe strawberries, asparagus, artichokes, tiny peas, and so much more. | F. | When the eruption of Vesuvius started on the morning of 24 August, 79 AD, it caught the local population completely unprepared. The catastrophic magnitude of the eruption was connected with the long period of inactivity that preceded it. The longer the intervals between one eruption and another, the greater the explosion will be. Luckily, the frequent but low-level activity of Vesuvius in recent centuries has relieved the build-up of pressure in the magma chamber. | G. | Iron Age Britain can only be understood from the archaeological evidence. There are few spectacular ruins from Iron Age Britain. Unlike in Classical Greece or Ancient Egypt, in Iron Age Britain there was no construction of major cities, palaces, temples or pyramids. Rather, it was an essentially rural world of farms and villages, which had no economic or religious need to build palaces, cities, major tombs or ceremonial sites. |
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