【推荐1】Directions: After reading the two passages below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

The Russian class

I started teaching in 1997 at Syracuse University. For the last twenty years, I    1     (teach) a class on the nineteenth-century Russian short story in translation. My students are some of the best young writers in America. (We pick six new students a year from     2     applicant pool of between six and seven hundred. ) They arrive already wonderful. What I try to do over the next three years is help them achieve their “iconic space” —the place     3     they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves-their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal. The goal is     4     (help) them acquire the technical means to become joyfully themselves.

In the Russian class,     5     (hope) to understand the physics of the form (“How does this thing work, anyway?”), we turn to a handful of great Russian writers to see how they did it. I sometimes joke that we’re reading to see what we    6     “steal”.

A few years back, after class, I had the realization that some of the best moments of my life, the moments during which I’ve really felt myself    7     (offer) something of value to the world, have been spent teaching that class. The stories I teach in the    8     (class) are constantly with me as I work, the high bar against which I measure my own. I want my stories    9     (move) and change someone as much as these Russian stories have moved and changed me. So I decided to write this book, to put some of what my students and I have discovered together over the years down on paper, offering a modest version of that class to you. It is written    10     anyone who is interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these hard times.

【推荐2】阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

I got afraid when I was going to join Thompson Rivers University, far away from my country with totally     1     new culture and new people. I became nervous because I had no experience of getting     2     (adapt) to a whole new place. After landing in Canada, I’ve started facing a lot of     3     (problem). I wasn’t able     4    (communicate) with people easily because the accent (口音) here wasn’t familiar     5     me. As Canada’s first language is English, they have a natural way of accent,     6     sounds like a bird singing a nice song. They use different intonation and stress. Moreover, I was afraid of     7     (make) mistakes.

When I first came to the university, I met up with national and international students, and     8     (talk) to them about my culture. I also gathered information about their cultures and traditions. I started to talk in English with my friends. Though I found     9     hard to avoid mistakes while talking, I did not give up for a single second. I kept practicing. Many people helped me,     10     (especial) the professors and instructors here. All I needed to do was hard work.