2 . Afroz Shah, a lawyer in Mumbai, hasn’t had a weekend off in four years. But he hasn’t spent this time preparing for _________.

His mission? Saving the world’s oceans from _________ pollution.

It’s a calling he found in 2015 after moving to a community in Mumbai called Versova Beach. He had played there as a child and was_________to see how much it had _________. The sand was no longer _________ because it was covered by a layer of garbage more than five feet thick — most of it plastic waste.

“The whole beach was like a_________of plastic,” he said. “It hurt me. The _________ mess.” What Shah had seen is part of a global environmental crisis. More than 8 million tons of plastic _________in the world’s oceans each year. It’s predicted that by 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. “Plastic in the ocean is a _________. And the sea species have no choice at all, ” Shah said. “We are ______________ their habitats.”

In October 2015, Shah began ________________ up plastic waste from the beach every Sunday morning. At first, it was just him and a neighbor, and then he began calling on others to join in. Word ________________ and with the help from social media, more volunteers got ________________.

For Shah, the work has always been a ________________ journey, but it has earned global attention. After he was ________________ as a Champion of the Earth by the United Nations in 2016, Shah now devotes nearly all of his free time to this ________________.

He’s now spent 209 weekends on this mission, ________________ more than 200,000 volunteers, some of whom are young students, to join him in what’s been called the world’s biggest beach cleanup. By October 2018, Versova Beach was ________________ clean and Shah’s cleanups expanded to another beach as well as a stretch of the Mithi River and other regions of India.

“This world talks too much. I think we must talk ________________ and do action more, ” he said when interviewed by CNN in October 2019.“We are a smart species. Well adapt. We’ll learn. And with these youngsters rising up, I see ________________.”

4 . One of my fellow volunteers, a girl from Tanzania, seemed a bit sad, so I asked what the problem was. She told me she had a friend back home, who was, really________with her university studies. It was beginning to look like financial difficulties, which would make it________for her to complete her course.

So this friend of mine had done something________: she had sent all her pocket money for the month to Tanzania to________her friend! This meant that she didn’t have much food to eat, no money to go________outside the village, no money to buy any clothes, and so on.

I was so________that she did this for her friend and I felt I had to do something. So,________ my next trip to one of the nearby towns I walked into the fair trade shop to buy some food. I didn’t have much money________myself but I thought I’d buy her an extra box of the muesli we both liked and some rice. I started talking to the woman________in the shop, who was also a volunteer and________told her about my friend.

The woman looked at me,________ “Does she eat pasta? she asked. “Yes,” I replied. She immediately started________a bag with pasta, cookies, more muesli, sweets and other things until the bag was full. “Give her this for me. It’ s my________!” I couldn’t believe it but cried with________.

I left the shop to go home with my________bag of food, I asked the woman her name. “Just Gloria! God________both of you!” she said.

Imagine my friend’s face when I________the gifts on my kitchen table. I have never seen her so happy! A few weeks later, she found Gloria in the shop and thanked her________. These two________women really showed me what true kindness and compassion is, and the________will stay with me for the rest of my life!

5 . My son Joey was born with club feet (足内翻). The doctors _______ us that with treatment he would be able to walk _______ — but would never _______ very well. The first three years of his life were spent in surgery, casts and braces._______ the time he was eight, you wouldn’t know he had a problem when you saw him walk.

In seventh grade he decided to _______ for the cross-country team. Every day he _______ with the team. He worked harder and ran more than any of the others — perhaps he _______ that the abilities that seemed to come _______ to so many others did not come naturally to him. Although the _______ team runs, only the top seven runners have the ________ to score points for the school. We didn’t tell him he probably would never ________ the team, so he didn’t know.

He ________ to run four to five miles a day, every day — ________ the day he had a 103-degree fever. I was ________, so I went to look for him after school. I found him running all   ________. I asked him how he felt. “Okay,” he said. He had two more miles to go. The ________ ran down his face and his eyes were glassy from his ________. Yet he looked straight ahead and kept running.

Two weeks ________ , the names of the team runners were called. Joey was number six on the list. Joey had made the team. We never told him he shouldn’t ________ to make the team. We never told him he couldn’t do it...so he didn’t know. He just ________ it.

7 . From childhood, Diane loved to write. Throughout school she_______ writing, but pursuing it_______ was never a possibility. Her father was a doctor, her mother was a nurse. “Medicine was a fairly_______ option,” Diane says. “And writing was a career where it wasn’t a _______ that you’d have high income.”

She became a doctor but still wanted to do some writing. However, being a doctor was so_______ that she didn’t take up writing until her thirties. She_______ a novel—a fictionalized version of her travels in China after university. She got excellent_______ . Diane sent it off to as many agents as she could find, and found one who wanted to _______ her. Suddenly, it seemed she was on her _______  as an author.

“I had one lengthy phone call with the agent where we ________all possible areas she thought needed ________. I worked on those and sent it back to her but didn’t hear anything.” It was not long ________ Diane found another agent who was________ if she was willing to rewrite it from the first person to the third person. She did the hard work and sent it off again. “I got back a really brief letter: ‘Thank you, I’m no longer interested.’ It was really________.”

A decade went by, and Diane found herself itching to write again, this time ________ for her own enjoyment. She ________ herself the challenge of creating a thriller and chose Western Australia as her setting.

As she was writing just for herself, something surprising began to happen. “The characters________ a life of their own; they started doing things I hadn’t thought about. It just________ out.” One day, an agent called from Australia. Three weeks later, Diane had a publication deal. Her novel Cicada was published in March.

“________ it hadn’t been published, I still gained so much from the________ ,” says Diane.

9 . Last Christmas while staying with my parents, I _______ upon some old love letters that my parents wrote to each other. These letters were all piled up in a basket, dirty and _______. Deciding to read and _______ them, I asked them if I could take the letters back to my Illinois home. They agreed.

As I opened each letter, all of them delicate with _______, I discovered a new page _______ unknown to me in this private _______ of my parents’ lives.

My father used to _______ in the army. So his letters were full of frontline _______ of the things about the war. Each of my mother’s letters was sealed with her 1944 magenta (紫红色的) lipstick kiss. I was _______ to these letters like a magnet (磁铁).

Just six weeks after our Christmas visit, Daddy became very ill and was hospitalized. This time, he was fighting a ________ kind of war. As I sat by his bedside, we discussed the ________. He told me how much receiving those lipstick-kissed letters had ________ to him when he had been so far from home.

It so happened that the next day would be February 14. I chose from the ________ letters the card my father had sent Mother in 1944 and brought it to my father’s bedside.

At his bedside, I joked with him, saying ________, “Today is Valentine’s Day, and I know you have been a little busy lately, but I’ve got you ________.” He became more ________ when I handed him the old ________. He carefully opened the card, and when he recognized it, his eyes filled with tears.

My father, in a voice tight with ________, read the loving ________ he’d sent to my mother fifty-six years earlier. And this time, he could read it to her ________.