In 1975, a San Diego homemaker named Marjorie Rice came across a column in Scientific American about tiling (瓷砖). There is a problem which has interested mathematicians since ancient Greek times. After Rice’s chance encounter with tiling, family members often saw her in the kitchen constantly drawing shapes. “I thought she was just drawing casually (随意),” her daughter Kathy said. But Rice who took only one year of math in high school, was actually discovering never-before-seen patterns.

Born in Florida, she loved learning and particularly her brief exposure to math, but tight budget and social culture prevented her family from even considering that she might attend college. “For Rice, math was a pleasure,” her son David once said.

Rice gave one of her sons a subscription to Scientific American partly because she could read it carefully while the children were at school. When she read Gardner’s column about tiling as she later recalled in an interview: “I thought it must be wonderful that someone could discover these beautiful patterns which no one had seen before.” She also wrote in an essay, “My interest was engaged by the subject and I wanted to understand every detail of it. Lacking a mathematical background, I developed my own symbol system and in a few months discovered a new type.”

Astonished and delighted, she sent her work to Gardner, who sent it to Doris, a tiling expert at Moravian College. Doris confirmed that Rice’s finding was correct.

Later, Rice declined to lecture on her discoveries, citing shyness, but at Doris’s invitation, she attended a university mathematics meeting, where she was introduced to the audience. Rice still said nothing of her achievements to her children, but they eventually found out as the awards mounted.

Please take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal. Imagine telling someone you meet today what you’re going to do. Imagine their congratulations and their high image of you. Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? Don’t you feel one step closer already? Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling will make you less likely to do it.

Any time you have a goal, there is some work that needs to be done to achieve it. Ideally, you would not be satisfied until you’d actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and he acknowledges it, psychologists have found it's called a "social reality". The mind is kind of tricked into a feeling that it's already done. And then. because you’ve felt that satisfaction. you’re less motivated to do the actual and necessary hard work. This goes against the traditional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right?

In 1982, Peter Gollwitzer, a professor of psychology, wrote a whole book about this. And in 2009, he did some new tests, which were published. It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests—everyone wrote down their personal goal. Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room, and half didn't. Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. Finally, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterwards, said they felt they had a long way to go to achieve their goal. But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes on average, and when asked afterwards, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal.

It was Christmas Day. For Antony, this was another day spent in a white-walled _______. His wife and son were enjoying the festival feast at home. But for Antony, he couldn’t enjoy the Christmas _______ with them. Instead, he was surrounded by flashes of red from roaring ambulances. He was saving lives.

About fifty years ago, Antony was born in a little village in Northern Greece, where traditions ran deep and religious festivities were _______ with the highest honor. However, he was a boy who _________ Santa. When asked the reason, he laughed out and said, “He was always there, but he never brought me Christmas presents.” He laughed even louder, trying to _______ his sorrowful feelings as he described how all the other children in the village received gifts except for him.

Antony further revealed that his parents’ inability to afford gifts unintentionally _______ his belief that Santa was an _______ magical man who deliberately overlooked him. While his peers enjoyed new toys, Antony felt the pain of exclusion. Yet, with time and maturity, his hatred towards Santa _______.

Instead of toys, Antony found _______ in exploring his older brother’s medical textbooks. His appetite for reading and the example his older brother set ________ him to study hard and eventually he became a respected cardiologist in the hospital close to his village, where doctors were especially needed. He worked ________ at the hospital, like Santa, faithfully ________ the greatest gift of all.

Antony’s story serves as a ________ that one’s upbringing does not ________ their future, but determination and diligence can pave the way for remarkable achievements. We can rise from ________ beginnings but we should never give up striving for excellence.

Dressed in long robes， a crowd of young people wanders around pavilions(凉亭)and royalgardens．Their flowing sleeves and heavily embroidered(绣花的)skirts     36    (gentle)sway(摇曳)in the breeze.They are not actors nor actresses in a movie set，    37     Hanfu enthusiasts in a themed event.

Benefiting from the growing     38     (popular) of social media and a craze for traditionalculture,Hanfu,    39    traditional style of clothing worn by the Han people, was brought back tothe forefront by a new wave of Chinese youth.

A community called “Hua Yan Hui” was founded by Liu Xiang in 2011 following a movement     40     emerged from the desire    41     (express) national identity and growing cultural confidence.Yang Kunning, born in the 1990s, opened an account on the video-sharing platform Bilibili andposted videos     42    (feature) herself wearing Hanfu.Thousands of comments and likes pour in onher channel as viewers find her videos     43    (attract) and creative-mixing traditional culture    44    modern dance movements.

The Hanfu market in China     45     (estimate) to reach 12.54 billion yuan in 2022 and willlikely rise to 19.11 billion yuan in 2025, according to research firm iMedia Research.