Below is a text with blanks. Click on each blank, a list of choices will appear. Select the appropriate answer choice for each blank.
Every day, on television, on the radio, and in the newspapers, we see, hear, and read about leaders and politicians making decisions that are clearly wrong-headed and that seem to us, the horrified watchers, listeners, and readers, counter-productive. To be reasonably impartial about such blunders, we must try to put aside for the moment how the decision might affect us as individuals; what we are looking for are decisions that are contrary to the interests of their makers. A glaring historical example of such stupidity would be the respective attempts of Charles XII, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Hitler to invade Russia despite the disasters it brought each of their predecessors.
Now, when investigating these matters we must tread carefully and remember that it is wrong to judge the past by the ideas of the present. Therefore, the disastrous decisions made in the past must have been seen at the time by contemporaries to be counterproductive, not just with the benefit of experience. Again, we must check to see if there were any other courses of action that could have been taken and, if so, why they were not.
