【明報專訊】Sam Smith was cleaning toilets in a London bar in 2012. A big winner of the 2015 Grammy Awards (格林美獎), he is as surprised by his sudden success as anybody else.

Fill in the blanks with the correct forms of the following words.

sing / nominate / success / album

Sam Smith, the 22-year-old English (1)__________ and songwriter, dominated the 57th Grammy Awards in the US, held in February 2015. (2)______________ for six awards, he won four of them. They include best new artist, Stay with Me for record of the year, song of the year, and In the Lonely Hour for best pop vocal (3)________________.

Stay with Me is a gospel-inspired ballad which has become Smith's most (4)___________ single to date. Smith has been called the "male Adele", as many have compared their songs, which are of the same genre. He is a cousin of Lily Allen, a famous English (5)___________.

■English highway-words and collocations

''Genre''

The term "genre" refers to a particular type of art, writing or music that has certain features which all examples of it share.

e.g. What genre does this movie fall into─comedy or tragedy?

■Vocab Cards Collect them all!

songwriter (n) 詞曲作家

encourage (v) 鼓勵

tuneful (adj) 悅耳動聽的

jazz (n) 爵士樂

■Glossary

dominate (v) (在……中)佔最重要的地位

gospel (n) 福音音樂

ballad (n) 流行的情歌

compare (v) 比較