1 . One snowy night, a pair of beagles（比格犬）was struggling on a rural highway. The father-to-be looked around anxiously, trying to seek _________ for his dear companion. Frequently he would look at her _________, feeling guilty she labored along, her way made heavier by the new life growing inside her. They _________ for a warm, dry place. When her _________ came, it must not be out here along the roadway.

As _________ would have it, Gus Kiebel, a county wildlife officer, who was driving home from work, spotted the pair. He _________ to the shoulder of the road immediately.

The beagles made no effort to _________ when Gus bent down and stretched out his hands to them. Gus _________ their tags（狗牌）by his truck’s headlights and tried to ring, but the falling snow _________ the screen. He placed the dogs in his truck, __________ his phone and called again. A man answered and instantly grew __________ when Gus told him why he was calling.

“I already gave them away,” the man responded coldly.

Obviously, these beagles were __________. Meeting their large begging eyes, Gus felt his heart __________. “Putting them back in the snow is out of the __________,” Gus thought to himself, “I must bring them home.”

It’s a simple story, but it speaks to the best of our nature: Kindness and love can keep cruelty and cold at __________.

2 . At 20, I was scared and lonely. My laptop was filled with the beginning of novels, half-finished song lyrics (歌词) — things I’d started with teenage ________ only to be disappointed by my lack of creativity. I was ________ trying to find a new way to approach life, with no one to ________ me in the right direction.

One Saturday, I went to a training day for my school’s new journalism team. The teacher suggested I start a blog as a good way to get into ________. Bored and in need of a ________, I immediately set up a Blogger account.

As I typed post after post in the months that followed, I assumed I would run out of ________. But somehow writing about the news and, later, about ________, came easily. Here was something interesting that required only a laptop and an ________. I loved the research that went into each post, loved being able to ________ what interested me and loved finding just the right phrase to describe how I ________. I found something I was good at and more importantly, something I ________.

I kept posting and slowly I got better. I ________, edited and even learned how to employ a metaphor. It wasn’t long until my mind was made up: I was going to be a(n) ________.

Seven years later, I am having just completed a fantastic placement (实习) in a local newspaper. I have never been so ________ to my younger self for actually listening to the one piece of advice that turned out to ________ most.

4 . How long have you been going to the same hairdresser or barber? It’s a question that gets us thinking about the unique friendship we _______ with our stylists over the years.

You have confidence in each other. You have a laugh together and regularly _______ each other’s news. Plus they try to make you look and feel your best. That’s a(n) _______ not only for a great friendship, but also for the perfect relationship with your hairdresser. When you find a good barber, it’s something to _______.

Many people have _______ experiences with their hairdressers. I’ve had my hair cut by Claire Miller for more than 15 years. She’s taken me through all kinds of _______, and she’s helped me find a totally new look now during the post-chemotherapy (化疗后) period with dyed blonde hair! _______ hairstyles, there have been communications about the joys and trials of motherhood, the _______ of health problems and changes in our careers and lives — the stuff of 15 years that we have _______ in the three salons Claire has worked in.

While she cut my hair recently, we chatted about that special __________ that forms between hairdressers and their clients. “You hear so many stories from them, and sometimes you feel like a counselor __________ a hairdresser. You assess their needs, and you know how to react to them,”says Claire.

For Claire, the customer interaction is something she loves about the job and that she has __________ developed throughout her working life. “It’s about being human and __________ about people. A lot of my clients are my friends and like family now. It’s my __________ to cut their hair, making them look and feel good, but I also want them to feel __________ by the experience,” laughs Claire.

5 . I pulled over and one of the boys standing by the road asked for some water.

My heart____when I heard this. In Wilcannia, where I now worked as a primary school teacher with a six- month contract, there was a drought. Quickly____my car,I gave a bottle to the children before saying goodbye. Moments like this reminded me just how____I’d come from my old life as a teacher hundreds of kilometers away in Sydney.

In my first lesson with Year Six I made a____for our class: Mistakes are expected,respected and corrected. We posted this on the wall in my classroom as a____to students.I hoped it would give students____to keep moving forward. We____so well that by the end of month- one,I____my contract to a full year in the rural or remote place!

A real____was helping with the town’s annual kids’ fashion parade(游行). But COVID pandemic____a move to online learning. So I____students to film videos of themselves singing From Little Things Big Things Grow. The children’s performance won wild applause. And ____I was awarded Music Teacher of the Year. This sort of____was such an honour!

Now, three years later,I’m____in Wilcannia. People always ask me how long I plan to stay here, and then comes my____reply: “Another year.”

7 . Human beings have somehow managed to engineer the night to receive us by filling it with light. This kind of control is no different from the feat ( 壮 举 ) of damming a river. Its benefits come with_________ — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design. _________ lighting washes out the darkness of night, altering light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have_________. Wherever man-made light spills into the natural world, some aspects of life-migration, reproduction, feeding-is affected.

For most human history, the phrase “light pollution” would have_________. Imagine walking towards London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, _________ candles, torches and lanterns, as they always had. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been more likely to_________ London than to see its dim collective glow.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were a(n) _________ country. As a matter of fact, among mammals (哺乳动物) alone, the number of species active at night is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet attracting them to it. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being_________ by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop.

It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need a_________ view of the night sky for our work. __________, like most other creatures, we do need darkness. __________ darkness is pointless. It is as essential to maintaining our biological welfare as__________ itself; the price of modifying our internal clockwork means it doesn’t operate as it should, causing various physical discomforts. So fundamental are the regular rhythms of waking and sleep to our being that__________ them is similar to altering our center of gravity.

In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to__________ our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best__________ against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.

8 . The other day,Jenny and I went to a cookbook launch party at our friend Odette’s apartment. We stood in her_________and drank Prosecco. While eating pasta salad, we chatted about work and fantasy vacations to Italy. After a couple of hours, it was time for me to head_________for the boys’ bedtime,so I turned to Jenny.“Okay, let’s_________behind the kitchen is-land,”I said, noting Odette’s position on the other side of the room.

Jenny looked at me in_________.“But we have to say goodbye.”

Oh, right! I_________that not everyone ghosts after parties. Meanwhile, I’ve been happily ghosting for the past_________.It started 10 years ago,when my husband Alex and I_________a big holiday party. Fifty friends squeezed into our tiny apartment, and everyone was having a_________ time until something started happening.

For the entire second half of the party,friends kept coming up to say goodbye and_________ us a happy rest-of-the-weekend. It just felt like a mass leave because we were consumed with saying goodbye to every__________person who was heading home. It felt like the__________was already over. The next morning, Alex and I made a decision: We would never say goodbye to the   __________of parties. We would__________slip out the door.

Goodbyes are, by their very nature, at least a mild disappointment. So I__________people to leave parties without saying goodbye. What if your friends wonder where you’ve gone?They probably won’t even__________that you’ve left.

9 . The day started out as many others before. I was always in a rush, always trying to ________ too much in a day’s time. It seemed as though the kids were________ underfoot.

Many times I heard that these were the ________ days, that I should cherish the ________. I couldn’t see it, though. I was________ by the long list of things to do.

A warm morning, I took the kids outside and started________ the flower beds as Emily and Logan played nearby. I was ________ to have a moment to myself while the kids were occupied.

It wasn’t long before I________ that the two of them were sitting beneath a small tree in the backyard, looking up into the ________ and singing a song. We had dubbed (把…称为) it“The Emily Tree” simply because it had been ________ when Emily was a baby.

Days and________ had passed, and Emily had grown ________ as well. She had turned into a bright and curious child who was always eager to learn and ________ and help her little brother Logan do the same.

________ got the best of me, and I headed over to ask why they were sitting there, apprently________ to the tiny tree.

Logan only________, but Emily told me softy in her matter-of-fact little ________, “You have to spend time with something if you want it to ________ nice and strong. ”She turned to finish her song.

Well, the weeds didn’t get pulled that day. ________, I went into the house, gathered a blanket and a picnic lunch, and________ my daughter and son under the Emily Tree.

10 . A relative invited me to come and live in his house. With complete _________ in his promises, I loaded all my worldly possessions onto a ship _________ India in November 2001. Everything had gone _________ in the run-up (准备阶段) to the trip. I was confident that this _________ was the next big step I had to take.

When I arrived, he said, “Things have _________. There is no place here for you.”

I was stunned. I was so _________ that I couldn’t speak. Like a frozen statue, I stood perched on the edge of the vast _________, not sure of what to do. The anger _________. I could not go back to England as all my worldly possessions were on their way to India.

In order to live, I submitted articles to magazines in India and, occasionally, they _________ me for them.

Those years of __________ left a permanent impression. I was searching for an appropriate place to __________, but only later did I realize that the movement itself was meant for my __________ development. If I had only stayed in his house, I would never have learned many valuable lessons. One such lesson was that through __________ and commitment to one’s ideals in life, any adverse situation can be __________. I am writing this story from my __________ in India.