Vocabulary Lesson 9 Passage Directions: Read the following passage, inserting the appropriate vocabulary words in the blanks.

Reaching the Heights Fear of heights is a common (1)______. In mild cases, his fear amounts to no more than the (2)______feeling many people get when looking down from a tall building at the (3)______people walking far below. In extreme cases, it can trigger an acute attack of (4)______. Curiously, this fear tends to lesson when people are no longer in contact with the ground, even if they are very high up. Think of how (5)______most people are when called to board an airliner. Because few people want to risk their lives working hundreds of feet in the air on tall structures, builders pay high wages to those who are able and willing to do so. That was the case when the Dominion Bridge Steel Company proposed building a bridge over the Saint Lawrence River, near Quebec City, in the 1880s. One end of the bridge was to be on Mohawk land; tribal leaders gave the company permission to build there provided that the company (6)______by agreeing to hire a certain number of Mohawks to work on the project. The new workers, however, had no experience with construction and were (7)______to positions as unskilled laborers. As the bridge progressed, skilled riveters perched precariously above the river were astonished to see these laborers making their way nonchalantly along high, narrow girders (beams) to watch them at their work. Some riveters attributed the Mohawks’ actions to (8)______; others believed that they simply felt no fear of heights. One of the project managers, seeing their curiosity about the project, wondered if the Mohawks would be interested in learning riveting and other skilled jobs. Given the (9)______in the hourly wages for laborers and the skilled ironworkers, the Mohawks readily said yes. Before long, several Mohawk riveting crews were at work. The first member would heat the rivets in a bucket of hot coals resting on a plank. When one was red- hot, he would remove it with a pair of tongs and toss the glowing (10)______to the second crew member, who caught it in a bucket and then placed it in a hole through two steel beams. The third member, using a tool called a dollar bar, held it in place, while the fourth flattened the end with a rivet gun. In this way, the steel girders were fastened together. When the bridge was completed, the Native American crews moved on to other projects in Canada. They were soon joined by other Mohawks who shared their (11)______for moving nimbly on narrow walkways far above the ground. The twenty-one-story Flatiron Building, completed in 1902, marked the (12)______of the Manhattan skyscraper-building boom, which reached its peak in the 1920s. Tall buildings sprouted like mushrooms, creating an enormous demand for skilled ironworkers, which Mohawk crews traveled south to satisfy. They helped to (13)______the steel skeleton of the 1,250-foot Empire State Building in 1930, for many years the tallest building on earth, and twenty years later helped erect a 204-foot television antenna on top of it. The first Mohawks began arriving in New York in the early 1920s and found (14)______in Brooklyn. Previously forced to live as (15)______workers, they now led settled lives with their families and had only to travel across the East River by subway to reach the Manhattan work sites. During the 1960s and 1970s when there were again many construction jobs in New York, the Mohawk community grew to some 1,000 people. The Cuyler Presbyterian Church offered services conducted in Mohawk, and local restaurants sometimes served authentic Mohawk dishes. The section around Brooklyn’s Pacific Street became another tiny piece in the ethnic mosaic that makes up New York. When the building boom finally declined in the last decades of the century, many families returned to their former homes in Canada and northern New York.