2 . One of the most famous literary challenges in history was when Dr. Seuss received a challenge from his publisher that he could only use 50 words to write an entire book. That’s all well and good, but it’s a tough challenge, to be sure. However, Ernest Vincent Wright would no doubt turn up his nose, as he challenged himself to pen an entire 50,000-word novel without once using the letter “e”.

Wright managed to pull it off. The final product was Gadsby, which is about a man named, well, Gadsby, who tries to save his city with the help of a youth group. It took Wright nearly six months to complete the work, and in his introduction pages he mentioned the challenges along the way.

One of the biggest challenges was replacing pronouns, since it’s tough to write a sentence, let alone a novel, without words like “he” or “she” or “her” and so forth. Additionally, he was forced to find ways to work around using past tense words that typically end in “-ed”, which, as you might imagine, is more than a little tricky.

Still, Wright did manage to come up with 50,110 words and a full story without any cheats, making it one of the most successful lipograms (避讳某字之文) in the history of writing. Wright self-published the book in 1939 and it was read primarily by people who tried to find any cheats, so convinced were they that Wright simply must have used the letter.

The entire novel is available online to read for free, as it entered the public domain in 1968. It’s a good thing, too, as the storehouse that contained the majority of the copies burned down, destroying enough of the books that it has since become a rare book collector’s prize, with copies being valued at thousands of dollars.

At the end of the day, of course, it remains a truly great achievement. After all, “e” is the most commonly used letter in English, with more than 11 percent of all words in the Oxford dictionary containing at least one “e”.

5 . Bethany Meilani Hamilton was born on February 8, 1990, in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii. Raised in a surfing family, along with older brothers Noah and Tim, Bethany learned to surf at the age of 7. She began competitive surfing at age 8, and by age 9 she had got her first sponsorship(赞助) .

In October 2003, after having placed 3rd in the Open Women’s Division earlier that year, Bethany’s life changed forever. Bethany went out to surf at Tunnels Beach in Ha’ena with her best friend, Alana Blanchard, and Blanchard’s father and brother. While lying on her board, Bethany suddenly felt huge pressure on her left arm and was pulled back and forth for a few seconds. Feeling no pain at first, she noticed the water around her had turned red, and her shocked friend first realized that she was attacked by a shark. Hamilton lost her left arm just below the shoulder.

As she recovered, she made two promises to herself. The first was that she would not moan(抱怨) about her terrible accident and the second was that she would get back on the surfboard. After only 26 days, she was surfing again! She is now one of the top 50 female surfers in the world. She also won first prize in the Explorer Women’s Division of the NSSA National Championships.

Bethany’s story has been turned into many books, including a few written by herself. She has appeared on many TV shows, magazine articles and in 2004 was named the Best Comeback Athlete and also received the Courage Teen Choice Award.

The last two books written by Bethany were based around the theme of being unstoppable. One of her books is named Be Unstoppable: The Art of Never Giving Up and has guided readers to be brave, enjoy life and never give up.

Walk in the halls of an academic earth science department, and you’ll likely find     1    (show) on a wall somewhere a strikingly beautiful map of the world’s ocean floor.     2     map was completed in 1977, being the first complete world map of the ocean floor and     3    (represent) the highest point of Marie Tharp’s career. It gives scientists and the public alike their first sight of     4    the sea floor looks like.

In the middle of the 20th century, when continental drift (大陆漂移) met with strong     5     (oppose) from many American scientists, Tharp’s groundbreaking maps made it possible     6    the theory of plate tectonics (板块构造学) to appear.

Tharp began her career at a time when few women     7     (become) scientists, but she was able to take advantage of doors opened by historical circumstances, becoming     8     (unique) qualified to make significant contributions to both science and cartography (地图绘制).

In 1997, the Library of Congress named her as one of the four     9     (great) cartographers of the 20th century. She died in 2006, but countless women scientists     10     (motivate) by her spirit since then.

8 . Yue-Sai Kan was born in China. In 1972, she moved to New York. When Kan was a child, she was told by her father that she should always aim to (力争) be the first because no one remembered the second. What her father said has been a driving inspiration over the years for her to become a bestselling author and a successful businesswoman.

Her new book Be a Pioneer, which is the tenth she has written and her first Chinese-language autobiography (自传), was produced after three years, inspired by her father’s words.

When writing an autobiography, the biggest challenge is not how to present one’s life, but to remember it. To help with reconstructing her story, Kan asked many friends and colleagues she made over the years to write down their memories of her from earlier times. So besides featuring Kan’s own words, the new book is also filled with those of her friends’s, which gives Kan a new understanding of herself — a woman who works hard, studies hard. and the most important thing is that she is a woman filled with a sense of responsibility.

“My helper Stephanie mentioned that I was worried because we were running out of money for the company. My housekeeper reminded me that before the start of one of my events she found that I had fainted (晕倒) in the bathroom. I was so tired that I was getting sick. They know more about me than myself,” Kan says.

“Writing a book is a good business to be in, not so much to make money but to grow the brain. I believe what I do will benefit the world. All the things I have done in Be a Pioneer — my successes and my failures — can be a good example to young people in particular. That’s the main reason why I wrote the book,” adds Kan.

10 . Emma Stone was seven years old when she experienced her first panic attack: She was just sitting at a friend’s house, and all of a sudden the house was on fire. Stone remembers her chest started to tighten. She phoned her mother, who didn’t understand what was happening, but came to pick her up anyway. Stone says her fear eventually disappeared that day, but the anxiety still existed.

Stone had massive separation anxiety from her mother. That was a large part, she thinks, of what was setting off her anxiety. But going to school meant that she would have to be away from her mother for hours in the day. “I started to receive treatment around age eight, because it was getting really hard for me to leave the house to go to school,” she says.

Despite her anxiety—or maybe because of it—Stone began acting when she was 11; by age 15, she had convinced her parents to move from Arizona to Los Angeles so she could go on auditions (试镜). Stone found that acting was a way to remain in the present moment, without worrying about the past or the future. Plus, she adds, “As an actor, all of my big feelings are productive.”

Stone won the Academy Award in 2017 for her performance in the movie musical La La Land, and was nominated (提名) for Oscars for her performances in Birdman and The Favourite. She has been nominated again this year for her starring role in Poor Things.

In Poor Things, which Stone both starred in and produced, she plays Bella, a woman who has nearly died by killing herself and then is brought back to life by a strange surgeon. After that, Bella has the brain of a baby and the body of a grown woman. When her brain develops into a young adult brain, Bella leaves the surgeon to go on an adventure with a man who has become crazy about her.

Stone says, “Anxiety is like rocket fuel because I can’t help but get out of bed and do things. That’s really a gift.”