04/09/2023, 20:24 Activity 4 – Mode: solve – UNIT 12: Brilliant ideas > Reading: Gapped text (Part 7) – C1.

Gapped text (Part 7) – C1.6 – MyEnglishLab

12 Reading: Gapped text (Part 7) Switch to Teacher view

Activity 4

Complete the sentences with the correct form of the underlined words/phrases in the text and
paragraphs.

A
It is, he adds ‘a very pure way of communicating. There’s a wonderful thing that happens when thousands of people in
a room all think about something difficult and start to understand it. Sometimes you can hear a pin drop when you are
talking about general relativity.’
B
‘I am a bit less combative [now],’ he admits. ‘Outwardly. I have realised that confrontation is not the way forward,’ he
demurs today. ‘I think that people like me – in all different fields – have a responsibility to try and civilise the debates.’
C
Cox quite fancies a trip into space himself, but he has professional and personal commitments on Earth that prevent
him traversing the planets. As well as the TV and radio shows and the tours, he still lectures. He is married to TV
presenter Gia Milinovich, and they have a seven-year-old son, George.
D
Does Cox feel that all this is bringing us closer to understanding the universe? ‘I think the mysteries are increasing,
actually, certainly in cosmology,’ he says. The universe is not behaving as the data from the Hubble telescope, and the

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04/09/2023, 20:24 Activity 4 – Mode: solve – UNIT 12: Brilliant ideas > Reading: Gapped text (Part 7) – C1.6 – MyEnglishLab
discovery of the Higgs Boson particle by the LHC, suggest it should.
E
Talking about family and fame is the only time Cox becomes tongue-tied. He says he has become inured to unsought
public recognition but still likes to go to places where he is unknown, like France (he is big in Estonia, apparently, as well
as here and in Australia).
F
This time he’ll be broadcasting from an observatory outside Sydney which means he can look straight at ‘the centre of
the galaxy: there’s a black hole there, four million times the mass of the sun, a very exotic object’.
G
‘Well,’ comes Cox’s trademark, straight-to-the-point reply to the latter, ‘we can see it.’ Cox was, famously, in a rock band
while studying physics at university. He re-entered the public sphere years later as an academic to combat a
government spending review that was ‘accidentally bad for physics’. He was an immediate hit with the viewing public.

1 There has been a spate of burglaries in our area in recent weeks.

2 The plans to change school start times have come under fire recently. Parents and teachers have protested.

3 It takes some parents ages to cottoned on to the fact that their children often play computer games late into the
night.

4 When the science prize was announced you could have hear a pin drop in the hall.

5 My elder brother always used to stick up for me when I got bullied at school.

6 I have my own opinions and I’m not going to kowtow to anyone else’s!

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