Cloze : Choose the best answer to fill in each blank and make the whole passage a coherent and logical piece.
Masada, meaning fortress in Hebrew, is situated atop an isolated rock cliff at the western end of
the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea. It is a place of gaunt and majestic beauty. On the east,
the rock falls in a sheer drop of about 450 meters to the Dead Sea; and in the west, it stands about
100 meters above the surrounding terrain. The natural approaches __6__ the cliff top are very difficult.
The only written source about Masada is Josephus Flavius’ The Jewish War. According
to Josephus Flavius, Herod the Great built the fortress of Masada between 37 and 31 BC. Herod had
been made King of Judea by his Roman overlords and was hated by his Jewish subjects. Herod, the
master builder, “furnished this fortress as a refuge for himself.” It included a casemate wall around
the plateau, storehouses, large cisterns ingeniously __7__ rainwater, barracks, palaces and an armory.
Some 75 years after Herod’s death, at the beginning of the Revolt of the Jews against the
Romans in 66 AD, a group of Jewish rebels overcame the Roman garrison of Masada. After the fall
of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, they were joined by zealots and their
families who had fled from Jerusalem. __8__ Masada as their base, they raided and harassed the
Romans for two years. Then, in 73 AD, the Roman governor Flavius Silva marched against Masada
with the Tenth Legion, auxiliary units and thousands of Jewish prisoners-of-war. The Romans
established camps at the base of Masada, laid siege to __9__ and built a circumvallation wall. They
then constructed a rampart of thousands of tons of stones and beaten earth against the western
approaches of the fortress and, in the spring of the year 74 AD, moved a battering ram up the ramp
and __10__ the wall of the fortress.
【題組】10 (A) breached (B) buttressed
(C) fabricated (D) fortified