【推荐1】When I was young, I read only comic books. My mother, who was a keen reader, tried to get me to read regular books, but they seemed _______ to me. Why would anyone want to read a book without pictures, I wondered? It would be _______ watching a movie with your eyes closed. And novels seemed to be too _______！ In my mind, a comic book was a roller coaster ride _______ a novel was five hours in rush hour traffic.

Whenever she saw me with a comic book, my mother would complain, which totally _______ my comic book reading experience. One summer, she even _______ me. “If you don’t read at least one book this summer, we’re not going to go on our camping trip,” she said. What could I do? I had been looking forward to that _______ for months!

“Fine,” I _______, “I’ll read one book.” _______, my mother took me down to her evil dungeon (地牢), the local ________, where the librarian ________ The lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book of The Chronicles of Narnia by C．S. Lewis. I unwillingly ________ the book while my mother and the librarian exchanged a(n) ________ glance.

When we got home, I cracked the book open and started reading. I ________ I’d read the first few pages then skip to the end because I knew my mother would ________ me about it. Imagine my ________ when my mother called me to dinner and I was halfway through the book! ________ a comic book was a roller coaster ride, the novel was all the rides at Disney world rolled into one!

I ________ reading the entire The Chronicles of Narnia series that summer, which I consider the ________ of my great friendship with books. Now I read an average of one book a week, and sometimes my wife ________ that I read too much!

【推荐3】In the 1950s, I was an only child of a single mother , living in a modest cottage in New Zealand. There was no TV and very little _______to spend on entertainment. _______we had our books and enjoyed _______better than reading aloud to each other. My mother read me The Faraway Tree Stories, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island and poetry as well. _______I turned seven, I was able to take my _______at the reading role, and we spent many pleasant evenings laughing over _______ characters.

In 1964, I was 18 and moved to Auckland, but we still phoned each other and talked about books. Years later, Mum’s eyesight began to _______. She found it _______difficult to read the small print of her beloved books. She enjoyed looking at magazines but missed _______up with the latest books by her favourite __________.

Later, I became a Special Needs library assistant and my __________was to select books for __________impaired（损伤的）people. In time, I introduced my mother to large-print novels and audio-books, which gave her a great deal of __________as her eyesight grew more dim(模糊的).

In her 70s, Mum’s choice of reading seemed to __________to mainly murder mystery stories. I was __________to see that, so I bought her a more “worthy” audio-book. The next day, I asked, “How are you getting on with that latest book?” “Oh, not so well,” she replied__________. I didn’t try to “improve” my mother’s literary __________after that.

A few years ago Mum __________away. There are still so many thing I’d like to tell her. I’d like to __________her for her early guidance in the __________world of books. And I’m happy to say that I’m also into audio-books now.

【推荐1】I’d gone snowboarding enthusiastically in France with my little brother. That day, fresh snow had been falling, and we were in a good ______. We stopped near the top of an off-path section going through ______. I let my brother disappear into the trees ahead, ______ I would soon catch up.

I began to ______ speed when I was suddenly thrown off balance. Just as I was regaining control, I ran into the trunk of a large tree. It was like ______ a solid wall. The pain was instant. I knew immediately that my ______ was broken and quickly realized the situation could get very ______. Nobody would be coming past. There was no phone signal. It was snowing and cold. If I waited, I would ______ be rescued eventually. But the chance of ______ to death before that happened was too high for me.

I tried to stand but fell down and almost ______ with pain. I managed to get the board off from my feet and moved it under my stomach so I was lying on it. I faced down the mountain and used the board to slowly drag and ______ my body down the steep, tree-lined slope.

It took about two hours ______ a skier found me and I got help. The mountain rescue team came, with my brother arriving shortly afterwards. I couldn't feel my hands or my toes，but I was ______ to know I was safe.

A helicopter took me to hospital. I had broken one of my backbones, so I had a(n) ______ where the doctors inserted plates. The constant pain was agonizing (痛苦的), but it wasn’t as bad as seeing the pain and worry I put my family through. The recovery road was ______, but I was lucky.

【推荐3】Namu is a Thai hairdresser. She is providing_______haircuts for medical workers who are fighting COVID-19 at hospitals in Bangkok. Namu began her free service in late March. In the_______, she was unsure about offering the_______, thinking it was unimportant. But now, she is_______with the warm welcome she receives from health care workers.

On her first hospital visit, Namu had_______cutting the hair of six health workers. But in fact she_______   haircuts to 20 of them at last. On her second visit, the number quickly, rose to 30. Namu said, “They just keep     _______. Some arrived and asked if they could have a_______right away as they had to go to work.” At that point, she asked her friends to_______her. Now, the team is usually provides about 50 haircuts each day.

Namu is just proud that her skill is making a________.“The medical workers are happy to get a haircut. I think they feel________and more relaxed. They all want to do something with their hair and________themselves for work,” she said.

For Dr. Bill, it is the humanity(人性) behind the haircut that is really________. He said, “I don’t feel like this is   ________a service I am getting. It feels like more of a________given by a group of people to our hospital staff. This is more than just a haircut.

【推荐3】I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a goods yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I can dimly remember the ______ of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a(n) catastrophe(灾难) can do strange things to people.

It ______ to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to ______ without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.

Life, I believe, asks for a continuous series of ______ to reality. In spite of the fact that they are never easy, I had my parents and teachers to help. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have ______ and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself, I am not talking about ______ the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an ______ staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite ______ , a real, positive person; that there is a special place where I can make myself ______ .

It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball, I thought he was laughing at me and I was hurt. “I can’t use this.” I said. “Take it with you,” he urged me, “and roll it around.” The words ______ in my head. “Roll it around!” By rolling the ball I could hear where it ______ . This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought ______ : playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.

All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to achieve them, one at a time. I had to learn my ______ . It was no good crying for something that I knew at the start was wildly out of ______ because that only ______ the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway, but on the average, I made progress.