中級閱讀模擬測驗　第十六回

Most people think a 11 is simply someone with a funny personality. In fact the job is closer to writing. A joke that takes eight seconds to 12 may have been rewritten twenty times, and a tiny change in 13 can decide whether a room laughs or stays silent. New performers test their material in small clubs, where one bored 14 in the front row teaches more than any class. Some record every show and study the 15 afterwards, counting the seconds of silence. Nowadays a good five-minute set can take a whole year to build.

A visitor who walks into a film 16 for the first time is usually disappointed. The famous street is only three walls of painted wood. Twenty people stand around one camera, and most of them are waiting. The whole 17, sometimes forty actors, may be called at six in the morning and appear in just ninety seconds of film. A 18 scene in which a house burns down can take four days to shoot. Later an 19 cuts all that work down to eleven minutes. The finished 20 feels effortless, which is exactly the point.