Two old and wealthy brothers made a bet     1     a man could survive a month in London with a million pound bank note. At this moment, they saw a     2     (penny) young man---Henry    3     (wander) on the pavement. He survived an accident on the sea and     4     (land) in Britain by chance. The brothers thought he was the man for it. They gave him a million pound bank note in     5     envelope and guessed what would happen     6    him. They asked him not to open it     7     two o'clock.

Henry sat down at a table in a restaurant without opening the envelope. He was so hungry that he ordered a good meal for himself. But the owner of the restaurant and the waiter looked down upon him because of his     8     (appear) and served him in a rude manner. Towards 2 o'clock, he opened the envelope and was surprised to see the million pound bank note. It was the owner and the waiter that were even     9    (surprised). They changed their attitude towards him     10     (complete).

A few weeks ago, my eldest son, who is in his first year teaching fourth grade in a public elementary school,     1     (decide) to put a suggestion box in his classroom, though he wasn’t quite sure     2     the box would yield. The result was not so much suggestions as appeals     3     kindness. From “Lots of people don’t mind their own business” to “I am stressed out because everybody keeps arguing about little things,” there was a class­wide desire for compassion, even if there is no clear sense of how to get it.

As a new teacher, my son is routinely surprised by things his 9­year­old students do, but more than anything he is surprised by how badly they treat one another. The children want to be on the receiving end of kindness     4     have trouble handing it out. On a daily basis, they     5     (trip) up by three obstacles: lack of impulse control, thoughtlessness, and difficulty with forgiveness, or letting things go.

The episode reminds me of the well­known Henry James quote: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kin D. The second is to be kin D. And the third is to be kind.” I think of these words when I’m with my kids, or just being a human in our world, struggling to understand     6     kindness is learned or innate (与生俱来的), or a little bit of both. Shortly after last year’s election, I bought a book called On Kindness. The authors also present a tour of kindness through the ages, from the Stoics through today,     7     yields one surprising truth: kindness, which seems immutable (永恒不变的) a part of the human experience as love or hate, joy or sorrow, is subject to cultural shifts,     8     (govern) by the thinking and mood of the age.

Published back in 2009, On Kindness ends on something of a down note when it gets to our modern times. In our striving     9     success, we have become so individualistic, too selfish, loath to admit that we are dependent on anyone, which brings me back to my eldest son. Twenty­two years old, he is all too aware of what gets lost in growing up, and so he wrestles daily with how to promote and sustain a feeling of kindness in his classroom, for these children who are our future. His students are extremely sympathetic when one of     10     peers is upset. “They are very good at comforting each other,” my son recently told me. “But it’s like they have to destroy each other first.”