William Butler Yeats was born in Sandy mount，County Dublin，Ireland on June 13th，1865.His father John was a law student who later pursued art，and young William and his siblings moved back and forth between Dublin and London during much of their _________.

Most of their holidays were _________with their mother's family in Sligo，a region whose landscape，culture and folklore（民俗）_________ his own works.

While his family belonged to the main Protestant minority which _________ themselves with the British，Yeats firmly _________ himself Irish. Indeed many of his poems and plays reflect Irish legends and castles. In 1885，Yeats started _________ poems as a young man of 20.Many of his early works were later published as The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems.

He became _________ in politics，which resulted in his becoming an Irish senator（参议员）in 1922 when the Irish Free State was formed. He _________ for 6 years but continued to _________ well into his seventies.

Later in London，he also co-founded the Rhymer's Club for __________ to share their verses，with his own __________becoming popular with other poets.In1899，as Yeats began writing dramas，he established the Irish Literary Theatre __________ other like-minded people to stage Irish plays. His __________ were influenced by the Japanese Noh style of writing，a type of traditional Japanese theatre which tended to be musical rather than __________ on prose.

Yeats became __________ when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923，becoming one of the first Irish laureates（桂冠诗人）.His book The Tower was set in his own __________，which he had bought and restored. __________，many of his best works were written when he was well past 50，and they continue to be __________ today.

In 1939，Yeats died in France on a trip there. He was __________ at Roquebrune，but according to his __________，his remains were later taken to Sligo and buried at Drumcliff in 1948.

   Canada’s Alice Munro, called the “master of the contemporary short story”, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. After that, the Nobel committee（委员会）said on Twitter that it hadn’t been able to contact Munro and left a phone message to tell her the good news. But The Canadian Press contacted her, and she was quoted as saying the award was "quite wonderful"and she was "terribly surprised".

Douglas Gibson, Munro's publisher read a statement on the author's behalf. "I am amazed and very grateful. I am particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians. I'm happy that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing," she said, according to Gibson.

"Munro is acclaimed for her finely tuned storytelling，which is characterized by clarity and psychological realism（现实主义），"the Nobel committee said.

The author has won many honors over the years，including the 2009 Man Booker International Prize. "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth，wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels，"the Man Booker judging committee said at the time.

Munro，who lives in Huron County in southwestern Ontario，was born near there in Wingham. She started writing stories in her teen years and studied journalism and English at the University of Western Ontario. She started publishing in various magazines in the 1950s. In 1968，she published Dance of the Happy Shades，a collection of short stories. In 1971 she published a collection of stories entitled Lives of Girls and Women，which critics have described as a coming-of-age work.

Munro gained world fame for writing about everyday people. "Here is a world prize being won by someone who writes about housewives in Vancouver, booksellers in Victoria, bean farmers in Huron County and accountants and teachers and librarians — ordinary Canadian people, and she turns them into magic," Gibson said.

   Ludwig van Beethoven is the most famous classical composer of the Western world. He is known for his powerful music and for continuing to compose after he became deaf.

Born to a musical family in the small German city of Bonn in December 1770, Beethoven was an excellent pianist and violinist as a boy. He soon became the first important composer to earn a successful living without working for the church or court. Beethoven began to lose his hearing in the late 1790s and by 1819 he was totally deaf. When he heard nothing, in order to hear the notes (音符), he cut the legs off the piano so that he could feel the vibrations (震动)as he played.

Beethoven enjoyed taking long walks in the countryside. The villagers respected him a lot and would not bother him when they passed him. He was a strange man with his untidy clothes, wild hair and a bad temper.

For his last 15 years Beethoven was regarded as the world’s best composer. The four-note beginning to his Fifth Symphony is one of the most famous moments in all of music. The notes were described as “Fate knocking at the door”. He wrote the popular Moonlight Sonata in 1801.

Beethoven never married. After his death in March 1827, his friends found his letters to a lover, but they never found out who she was.

Besides lots of concerts and broadcasts, over 200 films use Beethoven’s music. Although he died many years ago, Beethoven is still influencing the music world.

   The writer Margaret Mitchell, who wrote under the name Peggy Mitchell is best known for writing Gone with the Wind, first published in 1936.Her book and the movie based on it, tell a story of love and survival during the American Civil War. Visitors to the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta, Georgia, can go where she lived when she started writing the story and learn more about her life.

Our first stop at the Margaret Mitchell House is an exhibit area telling about the writer's life. She was born in Atlanta in 1900.She started writing stories when she was a child. She once worked as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal newspaper. One photograph of Ms. Mitchell shows her talking to a group of young college boys. She was only about one and a half meters tall. The young men towered over her, but she seemed very happy and sure of herself. The tour guide explains, "Now in this picture Peggy is interviewing some boys from Georgia Tech, asking them such questions as 'Would you really marry a woman who works？' And today it'd be ‘Would you marry one who doesn't work？’"

The Margaret Mitchell House is a building that once contained several apartments. Now we enter the first floor apartment where Ms. Mitchell lived with her husband, John Marsh. They made fun of the small apartment by calling it "The Dump".

Around 1926, Margaret Mitchell stopped working as a reporter and was at home healing after an injury. Her husband brought her books to read from the library. She read so many books that he bought her a typewriter and said it was time for her to write her own book. Our guide says Gone with the Wind became a huge success. Margaret Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book. In 1939 the film version was released. It won ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture.