4 . There’s no doubt that football is the global sport. Though basketball, tennis, and other sports are popular too, nothing comes close to football. Being played in every country in the world, football provides dozens of superstars. The numbers are greater when compared to any other sport, and this drives the popularity of football up. Have you ever wondered when the sport started and became popular?

Football has its origin (起源) in China and has a history of more than 2,000 years. However, modern football originally appeared in Britain in the 19th century. Folk football matches had been played before in many cities and towns, but never on a professional level.

Football became a winter sport game played in different schools. The rules were carried out by each school, and this made it difficult for players to play an official game with each other. It all changed in 1849 at the University of Cambridge that invented a set of standard rules known as the Cambridge rules of football. From that moment, a new star sport was born.

By the early 20th century, football had spread all across Europe. In 1904, FIFA was set up. There are seven original members, including France, Denmark and Spain, FIFA became the governing body for many associations in Europe.

England’s international success improved the popularity of the sport in the country. The league (联赛) in Britain was set up in 1992. From the 1990s, it became a truly impressive piece of football organization, becoming the world’s top football league in the process.

Football is obviously the most popular sport in the world. It is impossible for any other sport to take its place, especially with leagues spending billions of pounds every year to stay in the focus.

6 . At school, art class is fun. We _________with different techniques and generally get creative. However, a field trip to an art gallery is often _________. Last year my art teacher organized a trip to an art exhibition. The gallery was full of older people, who obviously didn’t want to be with _________students. We all got _________ and couldn’t stop chatting. Our teacher was getting _________ and kept telling us to be quiet.

The next day we complained to our teacher about the _________ of activities for teens at art galleries. She _________ that a visit should be both educational and fun. That’s when I decided to go online and look for art galleries that have special_________ for teens. Eventually, I _________to find a huge range of activities and proposed some to my teacher.

I also used the ________________ to learn about artists. Recently, I found a contemporary artist called Martin Bailey. I’ve ________________ seen artists who combine different techniques, but Bailey is totally different. He does unique illustrations with ________________ household objects such as umbrellas, headphones and even cookies. His art is simple, but it makes you see things ________________. For example, he notices that a flower is similar to a mop(拖把) and puts this ________________into life by drawing a little man with a real flower mop. It’s really ________________ ! I hope I’ll be able to go to an exhibition of his work in the future.

7 . When I retired, my wife Peg said “Great! You’ll have time to clean the garage!” After 30 years’ ________ as director of a radio station, I would finally have more time for housework, but I worried I’d lose the sense of________ I had felt in my profession.

I pushed at the garage’s wooden doors, but they were as ________as I felt in this new stage of my life. I finally got the doors open and started to empty the shelves. Then my hand hit something ________. It was a common old metal can. I ________ the cover and found a ________ envelope with a postmark of May 13, 1940 inside. ________, I opened it and found some flower seeds in it, “ Eighty years old! I wonder if they’ll still grow. ”

I ________the seeds in a plastic pot. I checked it every day, but nothing happened. “I guess they’re just too ________to be any good, ” I told Peg in ________ . I picked up the pot to get rid of it, but something made me ________. I changed my mind and set it aside. Meanwhile, I was keeping ________, buying some books to improve my photography skills and teaching my granddaughters everything I knew about gardening and dogs.

Six weeks later, I was out in the yard when I ________ to notice the pot. A new bit of green-a leaf had ________. I proudly showed it off to my granddaughters. “Look, girls, even something this old can still ________ for its purpose and be pretty cool. Just like your grand- papa!”

9 . I used to believe that only words could catch the essence of the human soul. The literary works contained such distinct stories that they shaped the way we saw the world. Words were what composed the questions we sought to uncover and the answers to those questions themselves. Words were everything.

That belief changed.

In an ordinary math class, my teacher posed a simple question: What’s 0.99 rounded to the nearest whole number? Easy. When rounded to the nearest whole number, 0.99=1. Somehow, I thought even though 0.99 is only 0.01 away from 1, there’s still a 0.01 difference. That means even if two things are only a little different, they are still different, so doesn’t that make them completely different?

My teacher answered my question by presenting another equation (等式): 1= 0.9, which could also be expressed as 1=0.99999.... repeating itself without ever ending.

There was something mysterious but fascinating about the equation. The left side was unchangeable, objective: it contained a number that ended. On the right was something endless, number repeating itself limitless times. Yet, somehow, these two opposed things were connected by an equal sign.

Lying in bed, I thought about how much the equation paralleled our existence. The left side of the equation represents that sometimes life itself is so unchangeable and so clear. The concrete, whole number of the day when you were born and the day when you would die. But then there is that gap in between life and death. The right side means a time and space full of limitless possibilities, and endless opportunities into the open future.

So that’s what life is. Objective but imaginative. Unchangeable but limitless. Life is an equation with two sides that balances itsef out. Still, we can’t ever truly seem to put the perfect words to it. So possibly numbers can express ideas as eually well as words can. For now, let’s leave it at that: 1= 0.99999... and live a life like it.

10 . Although we all experience failure in our lives, we don’t all react to it in the same way. An interesting research has emphasized the notion that there are some people who embrace challenges and disappointments as opportunities to re-focus their thinking. These are people with a growth mindset. Then, there are other people who see failure as a complete failure. They believe that they never had the talent anyway, and they probably never will. These are people with a fixed mindset.

Psychologist Dweck has studied these mindsets and provided evidence that most people intentionally place themselves in one of those two groups. The group to which you assign yourself frequently determines how you react to challenges. If you experience failure and give up, you have conveniently assigned yourself to the fixed group. If you experience failure and regard it as a stepping stone, then you have placed yourself into the growth group.

According to the research, people in the growth group tend to generate more creative ideas than those in the fixed group. To illustrate, consider Thomas Edison. In the 19th century, Edison attempted to improve the light bulb and experimented with numerous materials. Over a thousand trials, he managed to discover an element sustaining light. A reporter once asked him,“It seems as though you’ve tried many times and continue to fail each time. Why is that?”Edison answered,“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10, 000 ways that won’t work.”

In studies of creative people, psychologists discovered that a distinguishing feature separating them from the non-creative is that they make lots of mistakes and continue to work through them. Most people consider success and failure as polar opposites. In reality, they are both parts of the same process.