I’m not much of a gardener. I love having beautiful flowers—________ I don’t have a good record when it comes to making them grow.

A few months ________ my son left for the Middle East, my friend gifted me a box of tulip bulbs （郁金香球茎）. She explained that these bulbs were put into the ________ in the fall and lay sleeping all winter. They would ________ the next spring. “When you see the leaves of the tiny flowers pushing（挤）toward the ________ it’s time for your son to come home. They’ll give you what you need most.” She walked me through the process of planting them.

It was a long winter—cold and dark. I endured（忍受） the weather, the loneliness and the ________ I felt with my son away. Dead leaves, frost and finally a heavy ________ covered the area where I’d planted those flowers, and I soon forgot they were there.

Finally, the weather began to ________. One day, as I walked down my front steps, I noticed an area of ________. Those tulips had begun to grow, their tiny leaves forcing their way to the sun!

Day after day, ________ was just around the corner. Fragrance（香味）of tulips filled my garden, and my heart. ________ could stop either of us from running forward to the light. Almost all of those bulbs bloomed（开花）. With each brightly colored flower, I got ________ one day to holding my son in my arms again.

I wrote a letter to my friend, with a petal（花瓣）of the tulip.

Gulliver soon grew tired of living at home and wanted to go travelling again. He went to sea on a boat and came to a new island. There were some people in it. However, they were dirty and had long hair, and they didn’t wear clothes. They lived like animals and were not very clever. Gulliver was afraid of these people, so he ran away.

Then he met two horses. It seemed like the horses were talking in their own language. The horses took him to a house. To his surprise, a family of horses lived in it and the horses lived like people. The horses were very clever, and had schools and businesses. They also used people as animals to help them work, Gulliver soon learnt the horse’s language. He became a member of their community(社会，团体) because he was interesting to talk to.

Since the horses were so kind and gentle, Gulliver loved living among them. However, to the horses, people were nothing but animals. People also sometimes fought and killed each other. Because Gulliver was human and could think and speak like they did, the horses soon became afraid of him. They did not want him to make trouble, so they made him leave.

Gulliver built himself a small boat and sailed away. Finally, he returned home. However, he did not want to be with other people any more. He wanted to be with horses. Every day for the rest of his life, he went out to speak with the horses in his barn. Of course, since they were just animals, they did not really understand him.

Most dog owners believe their four-legged friends understand their words.     40    , scientists are not sure if dogs can get to know their owners’     41     (mean). But a new study at Atlanta’s Emory University seems     42     (show) that dogs really know the owner’s words.

The scientists asked the owners of twelve dogs to teach their pets to identify(识别) two toys of different materials such as a toy animal and a ball. Once(一旦) the dogs finished the job, they     43     (take) turns inside a special scanner(扫描仪). The owners then tested their dog’s language skill by first     44     (call) out the names of the toys. The scans told us that the parts of the dogs’ brains showed different information     45     they heard words they heard before, compared(比较) with what they never heard before.

Even more     46     (interest) was that the dog’s brains showed a higher level(水平) of neural(神经) activity at the sound of unknown words. This is     47     (exact) the opposite of what happens in human brains. The scientists say the dogs may become cheerful     48     the sound of new words.

When people want to teach their dog a trick, they often use spoken command because dogs manage to understand them. However, scientists say a visual command(可视命令) might be more     49     (help).