Read the speech segment given below and fill in the blanks with the appropriate discourse markers. Observe the tone and the punctuation of the passage and choose only the most fitting answer for every blank.

David Foster Wallace on Entertainment

Every year, the culture gets more and more hostile. Hostile, [i] _____, angry– just [that] it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that’s complicated and that takes work to understand because, [ii] _____, there are a lot of reasons, but [iii] _____ now, in computer and internet culture, everything is so fast and the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don’t feed the part of ourselves that likes…that likes quiet. It seems significant that we don’t want things to be quiet ever anymore. And that seems to me to have something to do with the fact that we feel like the purpose of our life is to gratify ourselves and to get things for ourselves and to be on the go all the time, [but] there’s this other part of us– a part that is [iv] _____ hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for [v] _____ half an hour instead of 30 seconds that doesn’t get fed at all. And it makes itself felt in the body in a kind of dread in here (touches chest).

Transcribed from: “David Foster Wallace on Entertainment.” YouTube, uploaded by

zoombockerman, 8 Dec. 2022.

Based on the above data, answer the given subquestions.