【推荐1】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．

Speaking of talented people, we will think of the young. Mozart created his first piano concerto at 11. Yet I can’t help but draw much    1    ( inspire) from those who succeeded at an old age.     2    ( give )hope, I am convinced that our dreams can come true if we have faith    3    ourselves and keep learning and working for    4    .

Consider the story of Mary Declany, a 72﹣year﹣﹣old woman from the UK, who invented a new art form in the 1770s. On a visit to a friend, she met two plant experts   who    5    ( take) a trip with an explorer through   the South Pacific. Interested in their work, she picked up a pair of    6    ( scissor) and began making flower collages with cut paper.

    7    surprised us most was that her works of art were so unique and    8     (value) that they were on display in the British Museum. There ’s the modern versio    9     (create) our   lives , without worrying about our age. And away from the mysterious world , Colonel Sanders didn’t open   his first KFC restaurant    10    he was 62, while Fauja Singh ran his first marathon at 89．

What might life be like if you looked very different from others? Most of us are lucky to be born with “normal” faces.    1    , the movie Wonder shows us that there is no such thing as being normal and that beauty is more than skin-deep.

    2    (base) on a bestselling novel, the movie is about a boy named Auggie. He has a facial deformity (畸形) and has spent most of his life being home schooled. But as he enters middle school, his parents decide to send him to a private school. There, Auggie must deal with judgmental classmates and learn to accept    3    (he) as he is.

In the US, most kids    4    (teach) that it is OK to be different. Most people in the US celebrate being unique.

But some kids have difficulty    5    (accept) uniqueness. It’s easy to pick on someone who’s different,    6    (especial) if you have your own problems to deal with. This is another    7    (center) theme from the movie—even the kids    8    pick on Auggie have their own personal struggles.

As Auggie’s classmates get to know him better, they come to find that he’s a nice kid    9    a great sense of humor. They start to change their attitude toward him. In real life, it may take longer to see such changes happen. But if we give people    10    chance, their hearts and minds may change in the end.

I was returning home from work because of a call from my mother. Shiv kaka, a     1    (distance) uncle of my mother’s from a small village was going to visit us. Actually, I hadn’t even known of him before. But surprisingly, I     2    (draw) to his simplicity the moment I saw him. I listened to him     3     great excitement at dinner. He had travelled on a     4    (crowd) train to meet us,     5     was clearly a long and tiring journey. He told us that his daughter was married, and     6     one of his sons had set up his own business and the other was a successful doctor. He just owned a piece of land and two cows. Yet he was proud of     7     fact that he was financially independent. Besides, he enjoyed playing with his grandchildren after his busy farm work. He insisted on giving me some money as a gift before he left. But the most     8    (touch) bit was his words, “Live     9    (simple) and appreciate what you have. This is the key to my happiness.”

We are all taught to aim for higher goals, and then we are buried by endless dreams, which leaves us little time     10    (notice) the small but beautiful things around us. I am grateful to Shiv kaka because he taught me such an important lesson.