If you associate modern British fiction with the cool, lonely tones of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, and US fiction with Jonathan Franzen’s _______inner worlds or John Irving’s sentimentality, it seems you have good _______. An analysis of the _______texts of English-language books over the _______century concludes that, since the 1980s, words that _______emotional content have become _______more common in US books than in British ones.

The _______, by anthropologist (人类学家) Alberto Acerbi of the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues, takes advantage of Google’s database of more than 5 million digitally _______books from the past several centuries. This resource has _______been used to examine the __________of literary styles and trends in literary expressions of individualism.

Such __________of the cultural information made available by new technologies has been __________＂culturomics＂(文化组学). Its __________think that these approaches can __________trends in social opinions and standards of behavior that are __________hidden within vast quantities of data.

＂Language use in books __________what people are talking about and thinking about during a __________time, so Google Books provides a fascinating __________into the past,＂ says psychologist Jean Twenge of San Diego State University in California.

The __________results certainly seem to show that informal descriptions about social mood are reflected in the __________(both fiction and non-fiction) of the twentieth century.

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are necessary to everyday life, where language is the primary tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language — what words and phrases we unknowingly _________ — can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguists attempt to _________ what is individual and general about the language we use. They also try to find how it came into use and the ways it _________ over time. After researches, they consider language as a cultural, social and mental thing.

“Understanding why and how languages are different from one another tells about what is human, and in contrast, discovering what’s _________ about languages can help us understand the heart of our humanity,” said Dan Jurafsky, the Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford.

The stories below show some of the ways linguists have _________ many parts of language.

Stanford linguists have found that even the smallest differences in language use is _________ the speakers’ belief, according to research. One study finds that a(n) _________ harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” can in some way reflect sexist stereotypes (性别刻板印象). The statement’s grammatical form suggests that being good at math is more _________ for boys than girls, the researchers said. Language can play a(n) _________ role in showing how we and others understand the world.

Studying other languages helps us have a better understanding of __________ around the world. People speak about 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there are a lot of similar things among languages, each one is __________, both in its structure and in the way it reflects the culture of the people who speak it. Jurafsky advised that we shouldn’t only __________ our own language — it’s also important to study other languages and how they develop as time changes. They can help us understand what is rooted in humans’ different way of communicating with one another.

Linguists study how certain speech models match special __________, including how language can influence the buying decision or their social media use, and they both vary a lot among people. __________, in one research paper, a group of Stanford researchers examined the differences in how two parties — Republicans and Democrats, who have different ways of speech, express themselves online. The purpose is to help us know how a(n) __________ difference of beliefs can occur on social media.

“Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in deciding how we can help bring people together,” Jurafsky said.

Research has shown that two-thirds of human conversation is taken up not with discussion of the cultural or political problems of the day, not heated debates about films we’ve just seen or books we’ve just finished reading, but plain and simple _________.

Language is our greatest treasure as a species (物种，品种), and what do we _________ do with it? We gossip about others’ behavior and private lives, such as who’s doing what with whom, who’s in and who’s out — and why; how to deal with difficult _________ situations involving children, lovers and colleagues.

So why are we keen on gossiping? Are we just natural _________of both time and words? Or do we talk a lot about nothing in particular simply to avoid facing up to the really important issues of life? It’s not the case according to Professor Robin Dunbar. In fact, in his latest book, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, the psychologist says gossip is one of these really _________ issues.

Dunbar _________the traditional view that language was developed by the men at the early stage of social development in order to organize their manly hunting activities more effectively, or even to promote the exchange of poetic stories about their origins and the supernatural (超自然现象). Instead he suggests that language evolved among women. We don’t spend two-thirds of our time gossiping just because we can talk, argues Dunbar – _________ , he goes on to say, language evolved specifically to allow us to gossip.

Dunbar arrived at his cheery theory by studying the _________of the higher primates (灵长类动物) like monkeys. By means of grooming — cleaning the fur by brushing it, monkeys form groups with other individuals on whom they can rely for support in the event of some kind of conflict within the group or _________ from outside it.

As we human beings evolve from a particular branch of the primate family, Dunbar __________ that at one time in our history we did much the same. Grouping together made sense because the bigger the group, the greater the __________ it provided; on the other hand, the bigger the group, the greater the stresses of living close to others. Grooming helped to __________the pressure and calm everybody down.

But as the groups got bigger and bigger, the amount of time spent in grooming activities also had to be __________ to maintain its effectiveness. Clearly, a more __________ kind of grooming was needed, and thus language evolved as a kind of vocal (有声的) grooming which allowed humans to develop relationship with ever-larger groups by exchanging information over a wider network of individuals than would be possible by one-to-one __________ contact.