Meagan and her close friend Samantha, both school teachers, lived together in an apartment in Denver. On mornings when Samantha had class, Meagan would help to watch her 2-year-old daughter, Hannah. Also part of the household was Meagan’s pet, Willie, a particularly intelligent and chatty parrot.
Willie was indeed funny and a good talker. In addition to some vocabulary learned from Meagan, he became a great mimic (会模仿的动物) of cats, dogs, and chickens. Plus, he could sing along to the radio. The bird was a nice playmate for the little girl, and he always knew how to lift her spirits. The bird was more than just a pet; he was a member of the family.
One day, with Samantha at school, Hannah had comfortably positioned herself in front of morning cartoons while Meagan was busy cooking in the kitchen, preparing the little girl her favorite breakfast treat, an apple pie. When Meagan was done baking the apple pie, she placed it at the center of the kitchen table to cool. She looked at Hannah and, confident the child was fully engaged with the TV, walked out of the kitchen quickly to use the bathroom.
Meagan was gone maybe 30 seconds. And suddenly, she heard the bird going crazy, screaming loudly. She heard two very distinct words from the parrot’s mouth. “Mama! Baby!” Repeated over and over again. “Mama! Baby! Mama! Baby!”
Meagan ran out of the bathroom to find Hannah in the kitchen, holding the partly eaten apple pie, fighting for breath, her face and lips a terrifying shade of blue. And Willie was still screaming loudly.Hannah had climbed up on a chair, gotten the apple pie from the kitchen table and was clearly choking on it.
注意: 1.续写词数应为150左右；2.请按如下格式在相应位置作答。
With a pounding heart, Meagan grabbed Hannah immediately.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Around lunchtime, Samantha came back from school.
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Lunch hour. Escaping from my office, I fled down Main Street in pursuit of freedom from the routine of the day. An old bell clanged(叮当作响)against the door of a dusty used bookstore when I pushed it open.
Looking through the horizon of shelves and lots of magazines, my eyes suddenly met his and my heart began to race. They were the blazing(闪烁) orange eyes of an African lion on the cover of a National Geographic magazine. I hadn’t seen those eyes in thirty years, but their impact on me hadn’t faded. As a kid I used to dream about Africa, living with wild animals.
The opportunity of spending a “gap year” volunteering in Africa or joining the Youth Corps had long since passed. Or had it? Yes, it’s true I couldn’t go to Africa for several months, but maybe I could volunteer in Africa for a few weeks.
Over the next several weeks I began to budget and save, determined to make it happen. The big day came. I arrived and met my boss, a young South African ranger(护林员)named Gary. He said, “Let me guess, you’re here because you dreamed of Africa.”
“Yes!” I smiled.
“Well it’s time to wake up. This is a working game reserve. These are wild animals.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone, take some risks, Have the courage of a lion.”
The next morning when we began our patrol(巡逻)in an open-air jeep, giant African elephants appeared in the morning mist. I was no longer dreaming in the pages of a National Geographic magazine. I was living them.
Moments later Gary parked the jeep and handed me a heavy shovel(铲子) and said, “Time to shovel dung(粪).” Elephant dung. Mountains of it. It will be used as fertilizer in the reserves sustainable vegetable garden.
Within fifteen minutes my back was aching, and my new work gloves were stretched out and so slippery with dung and sweat that they refused to stay on my hands. This wasn’t the dream of Africa I had.
注意：
1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Paragraph 1:
I began to question myself.
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Paragraph 2:
But at that moment I remembered Gary’s words “step out of your comfort zone”.
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Even before I reached the tent, I knew there would be trouble. My little brother Andy was following me, with a sleeping bag, a flashlight, and his stuffed bear. My friends Wade and Bred think Andy would ruin everything. He would get scared in the middle of the night and have to be taken back to the house. They complained so much you'd think they were hospital patients instead of kids I'd invited for an outdoor sleepover.
Andy promised that he wouldn't ruin anything. He wormed his way into the tent and settled in the far corner. Night was settling in, too, with the woods around us fading toward black. The house, with its porch light, seemed a long way from us.
“Time for ghost stories!” Brad announced as soon as I'd closed the tent. He told a story about vampires （吸血鬼）, but it only made us fall over laughing. When it was Wade's turn, he told a story of three guys who were camping in a tent. He described our situation exactly-except for Andy. When he was describing a terrifying creature, somewhere outside, a branch snapped （发出咔嚓声）。The hairs on my arms shot straight up. “These guys were crawling into their sleeping bags, right?” Wade continued. “When out of the darkness rang this terrible cry.” And out of the woods behind us there was a cry! High-pitched, frightening, and strange. The hairs on my head shot straight up!
“What was that?” Bred asked as the cry came again. We all looked at each other in horror, speechless. Wade suggested someone should go out to check, but no one dared. “What if it's something trapped or hurt?” Andy said anxiously. We focused our flashlights on Andy, whom we'd forgotten, sitting in the corner with his arms around his bear. Andy would adopt every lost or hurt animal in the world if Mom would let him.
注意：1.续写的词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答
“I'm going to see.” Andy ran out of the tent and disappeared in the darkness.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Andy said it was a baby monkey caught between branches, and it was crying for its mama.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Whenever I spread marmalade(橘子酱), I think of my mother. She was a wonderful woman, a five-foot-tall angel. She even befriended a skunk(臭鼬).
One day she was out back picking beans when she turned to see a skunk no more than a yard away. The skunk had a marmalade jar stuck on his nose. Mother took pity on him. Stillon her knees, she inched across the grass, reached out, and turned the jar very carefully. The jar slid off. The skunk nodded a thank-you, then turned and slipped into the woods at the back of the garden. None of spraying(喷)business. Not on my wonderful mother. She told that story over and over. And she always called the skunk Marmalade.
That’s not all. There was the time, maybe three summers later, when I was about twelve. It was a rainy morning. Dad went to work, and Mother went shopping. My friend Rob came over so we could run the electric train in my room. All of a sudden, a scratching sound came from the attic(阁楼).
“Sounds like some kind of animal, ” Rob said. “Yeah. Let’s take a look. ”
Out in the hall, I opened the attic door—very slowly. The noise stopped. I climbed a few steps. My eyes were at floor level. I saw nothing but boxes and trunks and an old dollhouse. I climbed to the top of the stairs with Rob after me.
Silence.
“Let’s look around, ”I said.
I found the animal behind a box near the chimney. You guessed it. Black with a white stripe down its back. Was he scared? You bet. At least that’s how I remember it.
I backed away. Would he spray me? Do skunks bite?
“Hey, Rob. I found him. Let’s go to figure out a plan to get him out of here. ”We climbed down the steps quietly.
“It’s a skunk, ”I said. “It might even be Marmalade. ”“Marmalade?”
I explained. But was this really the same skunk? Would he remember?
注意：
1. 续写词数应为150左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
“Come on, ”I said. “Let’s go to the kitchen and do an experiment to see what would happen. ”
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Rob and I followed as Marmalade ate his way downstairs, through the kitchen, and out to the back yard.
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Teresa Perkins was driving 80 miles per hour along Route 340 on Wednesday. The woman knew she was going too fast, but it was the only hope she had. Her dog, Jett, was dying in the backseat. About a half hour earlier she had received a call from her daughter, who had been playing with Jett, a 3-year-old, 120-pound black German Shepherd. The ball they were playing with got stuck in Jett’s throat. The dog was struggling to breathe.
Perkins raced home to see if she could help, but the dog slobber (口水) had made the ball too slippery to pull out by hand. They put the dog in the backseat of her car and began their race to the vet in Waynesboro.
About halfway there, Perkins got caught in construction traffic. Jett was struggling even more at that point and Perkins knew she only had minutes, but she was now stopped in a line of cars. She began blowing her horn (喇叭) to get the attention of someone, anyone, when three construction workers walked up to her. In a panicked voice, she told them her dog was dying.
“By then my dog was pretty much dead,” Perkins said on Wednesday night. “He was lying in the car, not moving. I had heard him breathe, broken- winded, but then he quit. I was wildly crying and praying.”
Cavaja Holt was one of the workers standing there. He stuck his hand down the weak dog’s throat and pulled out the ball, but Jett still wasn’t breathing. “And the guy behind Holt tried to breathe in Jett’s mouth,” Perkins said. “And he did.” Perkins jumped out of the car and helped start doing first aid on Jett. The two were working together to save the dog’s life, when Holt cried, “He’s awake.”
Perkins began crying and just thanking Holt over and over. When she saw the line of cars, she thought she had made a mistake going that direction. It turned out that it was the best choice she could have made.
注意：
1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Once Jett began breathing again, Perkins continued her trip to the vet.
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After arriving home, Perkins thought she was so anxious that she forgot to ask Holt’s name then.
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Ellen Kalish runs a center for rescued wild animals in New York. One day, a woman called and asked if she could help an owl (猫头鹰). The caller told her the tiny owl was in the Christmas tree in a shopping center in New York! Kalish was surprised. She has been helping wild animals for 20 years, but she has never heard a story like that.
The traditional Christmas tree was a 75-foot-tall Norway spruce (云杉) from Oneonta, New York. When workers were unwrapping (移去……上的包裹物) the tree, one of them spotted the creature. He was buried in the base of the tree, Kalish said. At first the worker thought the owl might be injured. He would not let go of the tree’s base (底座).
One of the workers called his wife and told her he was taking the owl home. He asked if she could find a place that could help wildlife. The woman then called Kalish.
Kalish then set out to fetch the owl. On the way, she looked at the pictures the woman sent her on the phone. The owl is the smallest of his kind living in the Northeast. How did he end up being stuck in the tree in the first place? “He could have gone to the tree to rest or sleep and got trapped later,” she said. “Maybe once the tree was loaded onto a truck, the branches made it hard for him to escape. Or he might have been too scared to move.” Her driver guessed the owl might have flown in from Central Park in New York, but Kalish didn’t agree. “That would be the last place he would want to go,” Kalish said. “The area around the tree is busy and noisy. Why would he pick that tree if he had a choice not to? He’s smart, and he wouldn’t do that.”
Para. 1: An hour later, Kalish met the woman who first called her at a gas station.
Para. 2: The owl didn’t spend much time at the center.
When Farrel was young, he had a Rat Terrier (捕鼠犬). He named it RK, short for Rat Killer. The following is how he came across the dog and adopted it.
That was sometime in the 1930s. He worked in the booth with the projectionist (电影放映员). He liked to see the theater from booth. At that time, people usually took a short break between reel (胶卷) changes. Farrel would take this chance to look at the theater audience. The people were usually talking or making a trip to the bathroom during the breaks. The lights were on, but turned down low. Farrel saw something that shocked him at this time. He actually saw 3 huge rats. They crossed the room and went under the seats. Then the movie was over, and he had to stay behind and clean up. That night he stayed in the projection room and watched from above. He saw several rats running around below. They were so huge that he could see them clearly from above. But when the lights were turned up brighter, the rats all disappeared.
He told the manager what he saw. The manager said that he knew about the rats. But he couldn't use poisons in the theater to get rid of them. So, Farrel suggested introducing some cats to the theater at night. The manager agreed to it and asked Farrel to find the cats. And he also asked Farrel to remove the cats in the morning and any dead rats that might be around.
Farrel found 4 large cats and took them to the theater. The cats were first kept in cages. Farrel thought they were ready for their duties as night “watchmen”. When the movie was over, Farrel opened the cage and released the new “night guards”. He left and headed home with a little excitement running through his mind. He couldn't help thinking about how many dead rats he would find the next morning.
注意：
1．续写的词数应为150左右；
2．请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
The next morning, Farrel opened the front door of the theater, and to his surprise, all 4 cats shot out of the door and down to the street.
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Later that day, Farrel's dad persuaded him to borrow a Rat Terrier from the local dog pound (流浪狗收留所).
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