If you intend to use humour in your talk to make people smile, you must know how to identify(鉴别)shared experiences and problems. Your humour must have _________ with the audience and should help to show them that you are one of them or that you _________ their situation and have the same point of view as them. _________ on whom you are speaking to, the problems will be _________. If you are talking to a group of _________, you may refer to the foolish methods of their secretaries; if you are speaking to secretaries, you may want to comment on their foolish _________.

Here is an example, which I heard at a nurses’ meeting, of a story _________ works well because the audience all _________the same view of doctors. A man arrives in _________ and is being shown around by St. Peter. He sees __________ accommodations(膳宿), beautiful gardens, sunny weather, and so on. Everyone is very __________, polite and friendly until, __________ in a line for lunch, the new arrival is suddenly pushed aside by a man in a white coat, who rushes to the head of the __________, takes his food and walks over a table by himself. “Who is that?” the new arrival asked __________. “Oh, that’s God,” came the reply, “but sometimes he thinks he’s a __________.”

If you are __________ of the group who you are speaking to, you will be able to know the experiences and problems which are __________ to all of you and it’ll be __________ for you to comment on the terrible canteen(食堂) food or the __________ bad taste in ties. With other audiences you mustn’t try to cut in with humour as they will hate an outsider making bad     __________ on their canteen or their chairman.

It’s not difficult to set targets for staff. It is much harder, however, to understand their negative consequences. Most work-related behaviours have multiple components. _________ one and the others become distorted.

Travel on a London bus and you’ll _________ see how this works with drivers. Watch people get on and show their tickets. Are they carefully inspected? Never. Do people get on without paying? Of course! Are there inspectors to _________ that people have paid? Possibly, but very few. And people who run for the bus? They are _________. Safety and security for the old, the sick, the disabled? No time for that. And how about jumping lights? Buses do so almost as frequently as cyclists.

Why? Because the target is _________. People complained that buses were late and infrequent. _________, the number of buses and bus lanes were increased, and drivers were _________ or punished according to the time they took. And drivers hit their targets. But they also hit cyclists. People are hurt on buses and by buses.

If the target was changed to _________, you would have more inspectors and more sensitive pricing. If the criterion changed to safety, you would get more _________ drivers who obeyed traffic laws. But both these criteria would be at the expense of time.

There is another problem: people become immensely __________ in hitting targets. Have you noticed that you can leave on a flight an hour late but still arrive on time? Tailwinds? Of course not! Airlines have simply changed the time a trip is __________ to take. A one-hour flight is now __________ as a two-hour flight. It’s the same with rail journeys. They now take twice as long as they did 20 or even 40 years ago.

The __________ of the story is simple. Most jobs are multidimensional, with multiple criteria. Choose one criterion or even two and you may well __________ others. Everything (well almost everything) can be done faster and made cheaper, but there is a cost. Setting targets can and does have unforeseen negative consequences.

This is not an argument against target-setting or, as it is sometimes called, “management by objectives” with the use of “key performance indicators” (KPI). But it is an argument for exploring consequences first. All good targets should have multiple criteria relating to critical factors such as time, money, quality and customer feedback. The trick is not to __________ just one or even two dimensions of the objective, but also to understand how to help people better achieve the objective.

As children enter and move through their school years, they become increasingly able to manage matters like homework and school projects on their own. _______, each year they should take on more responsibilities in the classroom and at home. These daily chores (家务) and responsibilities are an important part of learning that life requires _______, not just play.

Normally, of course, children are still single-minded with their _______ to have fun. While they may join in, particularly if _______ gives them time with their parents, children are not _______ to ask for household tasks, and parents often need to assign responsibilities as part of _______ to the family. At this age, many children find it difficult to _______ their chores, at least initially. Responsibility and initiative (积极性) are learned through a _______ process of guidance and reward.

As your own child takes on more responsibilities, he or she will probably have periods of acting _______, procrastinating(拖延) and dawdling (懒散). Most children do. During these times, parents need to step in and, with encouragement and gentle guidance, point him in the ________ direction.

Sometimes parents may demand too much ________ their children, or may see a problem in everything their children do. They may ________ them with too many responsibilities — an unfair number of chores, extra hours of taking care of younger siblings or a too strict schedule of after-school activities. When that happens, children may ________ taking on any responsibility at all. Parents need to ________ this kind of overloading, while still making sure that their youngsters are assuming a(n) ________ of responsibility. Children, of course ________ in the personalities. Some are simply not very persistent in the middle of chores. Others have difficulty getting organized. ________ others have trouble shifting from one activity to another. You should have a good ________ of your child’s style, and shape your ________ accordingly.

Children need to have some obligations and duties within the family, ________ they will notlearn to accept responsibility.