【推荐1】Once upon a time in a land far away, there was a______old man who loved everything such as:animals, spiders, insects...

One day______walking through the woods the nice old man found a cocoon(茧)of a butterfly. He______it home.

A few days later, a small______appeared; he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours______it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop______any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go_____farther.

Then the man came up to help the______   , so he took a pair of scissors and______the remaining bit of the cocoon.

The butterfly then came out______.

____it had a swollen body and small, shriveled(皱缩的) wings. The man was______ about the butterfly because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would _____ and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract(收缩) in time. However, neither happened!______________, the butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings.

It never was able to______.

What the man in his kindness and haste(轻率) did not understand was that the restricting (限制)_____ and the struggle required for the butterfly to_______ the tiny opening were Nature's way of forcing fluid from the body of the butterfly into its wings so that it would be ready for flight once it achieved its________ from the cocoon.

Sometimes ______are exactly what we need in our life. If we were allowed to go through our life without any obstacles, it would cripple us. We would not be as _______as what we could have been.

And we could never fly.

【推荐2】There was a very wealthy man who was bothered by severe eye pain. He consulted many physicians and was being ________ by several of them. He did not stop consulting a large number of_________ experts; he consumed heavy loads of_________ and underwent hundreds of injections(注射). But the _________ was more unbearable than before.

At last, a monk who was _________ to be an expert in treating such patients was _________ by the suffering man. The monk _________ his problem and said that he should concentrate _________ on green colors and not let his eyes _________ any other colors for some time. It was a(n)_________ prescription(处方),but he was desperate and made up his mind to try it.

The wealthy man gathered a group of _________ and purchased barrels of green paint and directed that every object his eyes were _________ to see should be painted green just as the monk had directed. When the monk came to visit him after a few days, the wealthy man's _________ ran with buckets of green paint and poured it on him since he was in red, _________ their master saw any other color and his ache would _________.

Hearing this, the monk _________ and said, "If only you had bought a pair of green glasses, which are worth just a few dollars, you could have saved these walls and trees and pots and all the other articles and also could have saved a large share of his _________. You cannot paint the_________ green. "

Let us change our_________ and the world will change too. It is _________ to shape the world. Let us shape ourselves first.

【推荐1】It’s been five years since I came to America. The year before I arrived, every weekend I was woken up by “Spring River in the Flower Moon Night”, ________ by my mother on a zheng.

My mom was always enchanted（着迷）by the beauty of Chinese traditional music________she never had the chance to learn a(n)______. In 2009, she got a zheng from a friend and has been playing and ______ ever since. Sometimes when I miss her, I search for the songs she used to play on the Internet. I ______ expected to hear them here in Boston.

Earlier this year, as I______ a new apartment, I met Zhantao Lin, the director of the Boston Chinese Musicians Association. At Lin’s house, I heard the ______ of the erhu. Lin later______ me to his music team and I heard the rehearse（排练）for a ______this year. It was beautiful and powerful — it ______ brought me back to my hometown in China.

(51)__is also part of Lin’s daily routine. Besides performing, he passed on his love of the erhu to his _______. I went to one of Lin’s classes and met 9-year-old London Turk. I asked him _________he chose to learn the erhu. “It’s much ______ to learn than the violin,” he said. Perhaps Turk hasn’t really started to_______ the beauty of the erhu, but his mother has always loved the instrument. “There are so many beautiful things in Chinese________: the music, the language, and the art. So we just try our best to let him have a ______ to explore it,” she said.

I _______my mom for giving me a chance to immerse（使沉浸）myself in the Chinese musical world. The music makes me feel relaxed. It can also _______me of my homesickness. If you listen to one piece, you will _______its uniqueness, power, and beauty.

【推荐2】Like many parents, I enjoyed reading a bedtime story to my two sons each night before they went to bed. After the story was over, we would turn out the lights, and talked until they fell ______.

One night after the lights were out, my 3-year-old son, Will, ______ me to tell them a story ______ by myself, not one from a book. So I ______ told him a story about the first thing that came into my ______. But to my surprise, he ______ it so much that he asked me to do that the next night.

Thus a story-telling tradition was ______ in our family. Ever since that night, they seemed not to be able to sleep without hearing one of my ______ stories. Of all the things I do for my ______，my storytelling is what they love most. It has created a special ______ between us. And they find that their day isn’t ______ without one of my stories, and so do I.

When I see how ______ my storytelling is in their lives, I come to realize how much our television and video-oriented （以视频为导向的）society has ______ in terms of the personal connections that storytelling brings. Before the ______ of television, computers and smartphones, a family’s ______ was built around storytelling. Many of the stories we have today originated from the oral（口述的） tradition. It was ______ down from generation to generation until someone finally ______ them down.

Storytelling serves as a creative way to ______ for me. During the storytelling, I forget about the pressure of the day and enjoy the ______ time I can spend with my children. I hope that other parents can gain ______ from storytelling, too.

【推荐1】Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something_________to say.

Seeing this style made me_________, I asked him, “I don’t_________it! You can’t be a positive person all the time. How do you do it?”

Jerry replied, “Each time something bad happens, I have two_________. I can choose to be a_________or to learn from it. I choose the_________.”

“Yeah, right, but it’s not that easy,” I_________.

“Yes, it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. You choose how you_________to situations. You choose how people will_________your mood. It’s your choice how you live life.”

Several years later, I heard that Jerry’s home was held up by three armed robbers. The robbers__________him.

Luckily, Jerry was rushed to the local hospital. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of good care, Jerry was released. When he recovered, I asked him what had existed in his mind as the__________took place.

Jerry replied, “As I lay on the floor, I had two choices: I could choose to live, __________to die. I chose to live. A nurse asked if I was__________to anything. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets(子弹)’! Over their__________, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me’.”

I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. __________, after all, is everything.

【推荐2】One year after Tom was born, his parents had a car accident. They never __. Tom's 85-year-old grandmother was too __ to take care of him. As a result he was put up for adoption (领养).He was adopted by a middle-aged couple who had no __ of their own. They were not rich and received little education, but they were __ people.

As Tom was growing up: he __ a lot of problems at school. He didn't learn __ and had trouble in reading. His __ sometimes laughed at him. What they said made Tom __.

After many years of learning at home, he __ overcame (克服）his difficulties. Today he is a very __ speaker and author. While he was growing up_: his self-esteem and __ were low because of others' making fun of him. It took him many __ to realize his dreams.

When listening to his videos and tapes, he shows confidence. He tells about his __ and how he overcame the challenges in his life. He has a very __       sentence: “You cannot expect to achieve new goals or move beyond your present situations __ you change.”

For those who have low self-confidence, I suggest you __ reading about Tom's world. Many people have so much potential（潜能）       to be discovered. If you have a dream, then start today to __ yourself towards it. If someone like Tom who has __ in learning can make such achievements, why can't you succeed?

【推荐3】I had worked for long at the same dead-end job with no pay increases. _________ I was considering leaving the profession when being offered the job of Office Manager for a company. My task was to turn the company _________.

The _________ knew that would be no easy task, so he offered me good salary. I accepted it. Later, my husband joined me and became my colleague. With our efforts together, our company earn more money as planned. So I was _________, becoming State Manager with a big salary increase. We bought a large home and beautiful cars, and seemed to be living the American Dream.

Later, _________ the downturn in the economy the company reorganized and my _________ was removed, and so was my husband’s. _________, we got new ones, but made minimum wages. We had to move into a tiny apartment. It was _________. I measured personal success by how many big and expensive things I _________. Without them, I felt unsuccessful.

Our loss forced us to ____________ what we really wanted out of life. We realized that to keep that company afloat, we had been so ____________ every day that we had sacrificed time that should have been spent with our family and friends. We had ____________ important births, graduations and weddings. We knew we needed a change. Now-years later-we are living a more ____________ life. Our home is ____________ but it’s fully paid for. We don’t have many things that need dusting-only the necessities. Now we are truly living and ____________ the American Dream.