三、文意選填 10 %    Life of Pi is a fantasy adventure novel by Yann Martel. The protagonist, PiscineMolitor "Pi" Patel, is something of an expert on animal behavior. As the son of a zooowner in the South Indian city of Pondicherry, he grew up on familiar 61 withhowler monkeys, one-wattled cassowaries and American bison; as a result, he’sattuned to the intricacies of interspecies cohabitation. This zoological savvy proves62 to Pi later in his life.     To escape the political 63 of 1970’s India, the Patel family say goodbye totheir friends and family and board a cargo ship bound for Canada, taking with themall the animals from their zoo. En route, the ship 64 to a massive storm andsinks, resulting in Pi’s family's death. During the storm, Pi escapes in a small lifeboatwith a spotted hyena, an injured Grant’s zebra, and an orangutan. As Pi 65 tosurvive among the animals, the hyena kills the zebra, then the orangutan, much to Pi'sdistress. At this point, it is discovered that a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker hadbeen hiding under the boat's tarpaulin; it kills and eats the hyena. Frightened, Piconstructs a small raft out of rescue flotation devices, tethers it to the boat, and 66to it. Thanks to a territory-defining tarpaulin and the general 67 of twotraumatized and seasick creatures, Pi remains uneaten long enough to reach animportant insight about his boatmate: “I had to tame him,” he realizes. “It was not aquestion of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in thesame boat.” As 68 as it may seem, Pi understands that survival depends onkeeping his ferocious opponent alive and well—“because if he died I would be leftalone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. If I still had the will tolive, it was thanks to Richard Parker.”    In the book’s final chapters, Martel gives the story an intriguing twist. When twoofficials from the Japanese Ministry of Transport do not believe Pi’s story with aBengal tiger, he tells an 69 story of human brutality, which leads the Japaneseofficials to believe that the orangutan represents his mother, the zebra represents thesailor, the hyena represents the cook, and Pi is the tiger, Richard Parker. The twistedending leaves the readers with more questions than answers, but somehow that is70 more satisfying than the majority of predictable stories. 
(A) alternative
(B) strives
(C) terms
(D) retreats
(E) bewilderment (F) instability (G) submerges (H) paradoxical(I) infinitely (J) indispensable (K) succumbs (L) fatigued
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