Ask most people for their list of Top Ten fears, and you’ll be sure to find being burgled fairly high on the list. An informal survey I carried out among friends at a party last week (41)________that eight of them had their homes broken into more than twice, and two had been burgled five times.To put the record (42)________, none of my friends owns valuable paintings or a sideboard full of family silverware. Three of them are students, in fact. The most (43)________burglary, it seems, involves the theft of easily transportable items—the television, the video, even food from the freezer. This may have something to do with the fact that the average burglar is(44)________his (or her) late teens, and probably wouldn’t know what to do with a Picasso, (45)________selling a Walkman or a vacuum cleaner is a much easier matter. They are perhaps not so much (46)________criminals as hard-up young people who need a few pounds and some excitement. (47)________that this makes having your house turned upside down and your favourite things stolen any easier to accept. In most cases, the police have no luck (48)________any of the stolen goods. Unless there is any (49)________evidence, they are probably unable to do anything at all. And alarms or special locks don’t seem to help either. The only advice my friends could (50)________up with was “Never live on the ground floor” and “Keep two or three very fierce dogs”.
