Passage 2 Directions: Listen to a short passage three times. When the passage is read for the first time, listen for its general idea. When the passage is read for the second time, fill in the blanks with the exact words you hear. When the passage is read for the third time, check what you have written. Almost forgotten these days, Mollie Panter-Downes’ work provides a vivid impression of life in the Second World War. A Londoner by birth, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote for The New Yorker for about 50 years. In the 1930s, she sold the magazine a few poems, some short stories, and a piece about Jewish (1) ________ children coming to England. In 1939, with war approaching, Harold Ross, the editor of the magazine, was (2) ________to find a London correspondent, and his fiction editor suggested Panter-Downes. Thereafter, she started to write for The New Yorker, specifically for a column (3) ________“Letter from London”. Weekly or fortnightly, Panter-Downes would put together a letter of about 1,500 words and had it cabled to New York. There it needed almost no editing because her writing was always concise. American readers (4) ________ the war in England through Panter-Downes’ letters. They read of the evacuation of pets as well as children, and the difficulties people (5) ________, not just in terms of losses of ships and territory but also in terms of no food and hot-water bottles. The British temper found a splendid(6) ________ in Panter-Downes. She also desired to give voice to the people of all classes, and her willingness to (7) ________ working-class Londoners was evident in a report about a dustman’s family in 1944. Panter-Downes went on writing “Letter from London” into the 1980s. She wrote reporter pieces and (8) ________ on such subjects as the British Museum and novelist E. M. Forster. Several of her books, for example Ooty Preserved (1967) and At the Pines (1971), largely appeared in The New Yorker. She (9) ________ the magazine for decades until 1985, not long after it was acquired by Samuel I. Newhouse, Jr. Today Panter-Downes is (10) ________ unknown in Britain. It seems a terrible shame to risk losing a writer who makes accurate yet subtle observations about human beings and how they deal with life.