单项选择题

Decide which of the choices given below would best complete the passage if inserted in the corresponding blanks. Mark the best choice for each blank on your answer sheet.
It was only in death (31) the world realized how famous Diana, (32) Princess of Wales, really was. All the years while she was still (33) , were as nothing compared (34) the media attention she (35) after her tragic death in a car (36) in Paris, at the end of August.
Television companies dropped their normal programs to broadcast nonstop reports and British newspapers became (37) more than extended obituaries. Some people might have accused the media (38) overdoing it, but the public reaction was, if (39) , more intense and emotional. In Britain, hundreds of thousands of people, from babies (40) arms to pensioners, (41) for hours to sign books of condolence at James’s Palace in London. And, by the time of Diana’s funeral on Saturday, 6 September, the entrances (42) all of London’s main Royal Palaces had been made impassable by carpets of flowers tens of meters deep.
The Diana "phenomenon" began 17 years (43) , in 1980, when rumors began to circulate that she and the Prince of Wales were to marry. At the time, she was a(n) (44) teacher in a London kindergarten, but she had many of the (45) deemed essential for the wife of the heir to the throne. She was an aristocrat-her father was an earl, her mother the daughter of a baron-family’s close ties (46) the Royal Family went back centuries. And she was young, attractive and (47) a virgin.
To the press and the public, this young woman was a welcome (48) from the celebrities and politicians that they (49) When the wedding (50) in July 1981, it was watched by an estimated one billion people-a fifth of word’s population.