1 . Reading involves looking at illustrative symbols and expressing mentally the sounds and ideas they represent. Concepts of reading have changed _______ over the centuries. During the 1950’s and 1960’s especially, increased attention has been devoted to _______ the reading process. Although experts agree that reading _______ a complex organization of higher mental _______, they disagree about the exact nature of the process. Some experts, who regard language primarily as a code using symbols to represent sounds, _______ reading as simply the decoding (解码) of symbols into the sounds they stand for.

These authorities _______ that meaning, being concerned with thinking, must be taught independently of the decoding process. Others maintain that reading is inexplainably related to thinking, and that a child who pronounces sounds without _______ their meaning is not truly reading. The reader, _______ some, is not just a person with a theoretical ability to read but one who _______ reads.

Many adults, although they have the ability to read, have never read a book in its ________. By some experts they would not be ________ as readers. Clearly, the philosophy, objectives, methods and materials of reading will depend on the definition one uses. By the most ________ and satisfactory definition, reading is the ability to ________ the sound-symbols code of the language, to interpret meaning for various ________, at various rates, and at various levels of difficulty, and to do so widely and enthusiastically. ________, reading is the interpretation of ideas through the use of symbols representing sounds and ideas.

2 . Eric loses his dog, Nova, on a walk. She has pulled the leash (绳子) from his hand in ________ of a rabbit. He puts up signs, ________ neighbors, and enlists friends to help search for Nova, but with no ________.

A week later, a beautiful woman named Vanessa shows up at Eric’s front door. She has Nova. After Nova and Eric reconnect in a chaotic, ________ display of affection, Eric thanks the woman. They talk for a while and seem to ________. Soon, Eric and Vanessa fall in love.

A couple of months go by. While driving on his way to pick up Vanessa, Eric is T-boned at full speed by a distracted driver who ________ a red light. Eric is ________ unconscious. Later, he finds himself in a hospital. A doctor ________ Eric of what has happened and explains that he has suffered a severe head ________ and that they will need to run a brain scan to ________ if there’s any chance of permanent brain damage.

The next day, the doctor comes into Eric’s room and tells him they have found a tumor (肿瘤) in his brain. “________, we only catch a tumor after someone realizes something’s wrong when they start to feel the ________ which is almost always too late, but this tumor is caught before it grows into any other areas of your brain, which in almost all cases becomes ________. Eric, this car accident basically saved your life.”

This ________ of events led Eric to realize that sometimes a ________ could be a blessing in disguise.

3 . When I started learning German some time ago, I realized the power of stories and storytelling in my own life.

I was ________ memorizing my first few German words. And I quickly ________ that this time, my native Italian and the other languages I’d learned would not be of much ________ .

While it was quite ________ to memorize words similar to English, like gut, muss, Ende, and Freund, there were many words for which I had no reference to ________ . Among them were Schatz (treasure) and Insel (Island). And yet I learned these two words easily. How? The ________ is simple. Without even ________ it, I had already memorized these words through a story.

One day, when I was a kid, I was with my father at a flea market (跳蚤市场) and we ________ a beautifully illustrated (有插图的) children’ s book. The cover and pictures were so great that I almost ________ to notice that the ________ was not in Italian. “Luca, we can buy it, ________ the book is in German,” said my father. I read the title out loud, with some ________ : “Die Scha... tz... ins ... el.”

Once home, my father explained that it was a German translation of the famous book “Treasure Island” . He________me the Italian edition (版本) and suggested that I ________ it while turning over the pages of the illustrated one. Thanks to the story I read, I passively (被动地)________ two words in German (Schatz and Insel) which are usually quite difficult words to learn, at least for Italian speakers.

4 . I was talking to some friends while standing in line in the cafeteria at my middle school. As I started to share a funny story, my friend Elizabeth _______ me. “Coco! Coco!” she called out. Everyone laughed. This is so _______, I thought. I felt a little bit uncomfortable.

However, I never wanted to ask what “Coco” meant. I _______ it was a code word for a cute boy. Elizabeth was one of the girls that everyone wanted to be friends with. I felt _______ to be friends with her. Later, I noticed that Elizabeth often said bad things about other kids. I would have never said those things about someone, but to fit in, I _______ when Elizabeth said them.

One day, a classmate stopped by my locker and said to me, “‘Coco’ means Elizabeth thinks you’re being _______. It’s really mean.” My eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t _______ it.

The next day, at lunchtime, I sat beside Macy, who was sitting with another two girls and who had always seemed nice, _______ that she didn’t know about Coco. “You know Elizabeth is mean, right?” My heart _______. She knew. Before I could respond, Macy said, “You didn’t ________ to be treated that way, and nobody else does either.” I smiled and then talked to my new friends with ________. We laughed a lot, and no one interrupted with a mean code word.

Most adolescents are attempting to ________ who they are and who they want to be. The word Coco will always serve as a(n) ________ that I need to stay ________ to myself and never compromise my values to be friends with someone. Because with ________ friends, I won’t have to.

5 . Tooth-fairy nights were always filled with expectation at our house. One such night, our daughter informed us that her loose tooth had finally __ .

“How exciting,” we told her. “Put it under your pillow____the tooth fairy will visit you tonight.”

“Okay,” our daughter agreed, carefully guarding her newly acquired prized____in a loose fist.

We reminded ourselves to check for her tooth once our____was over. However, when the film was over we ___forgot.

The next mooning, we were awakened by cries of____from our daughter’s room.“Mommty! Daddy! Come and see what the tooth fairy brought me!”

Astonished, my husband and I exchanged____glances. Quickly,   we____our way to our daughter’s room and found her sitting quietly on her bed,___out the window at a___.Her eyes shone with pure___.

As she was absorbed in the rainbow, I____under her pillow to “check for any other____that she may have overlooked.”

“Are you sure you felt all around when____your prize? ”I asked, and we watched as she carefully explored underneath her pillow.

“Wow! Two prizes! ” she said, proudly waving the dollar bill. “She must have overlooked during her first treasure ___ ."

6 . Sometimes one plus one does equal three. When Mandekic complained to her colleague Dave how _________ it was to get students excited about math, he made a surprising suggestion: “Why not _________in something they enjoy, like sports?”

The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first _________in 2011, when they were invited to a school program for kids who’d _________Grade 9 math.

At first, the students weren’t exactly _________. So, Dave tried giving the kids techniques to improve their shooting while also helping them calculate their field-goal percentage-which, _________, taught them about fractions (分数).

At the end of the game, the winning team was _________based on which group had the highest total percentage and had done the most _________math. When the bell rang, they were so_________on collecting data and figuring out which team won that they didn’t leave.

“I was __________ at math,” says Duane, a Grade 9 student. “But once I realized the sport I loved was __________to math, it made me a lot better at it.”

Almost any math problem, Mandekic and Dave realized, can be taught on the __________.They have since established a private high school. __________, it serves only boys, but Dave hopes to change that.

Last year, one of the school’s first graduates __________a university scholarship for his performance in the classroom, not on the court. “If we didn’t do our work, we weren’t playing at the game,” he says, explaining that coaches would __________kids who didn’t keep up in class. “At Uchenna, we were student athletes, after all, not athlete students.”

7 . Memories always die hard. True! Thirty years ago, I was a second-year medical student practicing at a near-by hospital. My university’s philosophy was to get students seeing patients early in their education. Nice as it is, it _______one detail: second-year students may know next to nothing.

Assigned to my team that day was a fully-occupied doctor and he told us to start small. Along with me were two guys just as _______ as I was, but in a scarier way: they had recently graduated from medical school as MDs (medical doctor).

The day began at 6:30 am. We did a quick check of our three patients and later we were to _______our findings to the doctor, which we supposed was a piece of cake.

But when I arrived in the room of 70-year-old Mr. Adams, he was sitting up in bed, sweating and _______heavily. He’d just had a hip operation and looked terrible. I listened to his lungs with my stethoscope, but they _______clear. Next I checked and found his heart rate had been _______ , but his temperature was steady. It didn’t seem like heart failure, nor did it appear to be pneumonia. So l asked Mr. Adams what he thought was going on.

“It’s really hot in here, Doc”he replied.

So I concluded that his condition resulted from the stuffy room and told him the rest of the team would return in a few minutes, _______ him it was OK. He then _______ a smile and waved goodbye weakly.

Back to my office, still _______ about Mr. Adams, I checked my textbooks and notes. I ________when seeing his symptoms on the page: heavy sweating and shortness of breath ________ clear lungs — that’s pulmonary embolism (肺部栓). Obviously, I made a silly mistake and________consumed me.

“Code Blue Room307!”, however, I instantly called the doctor,________to the room.

________, he was still fine and received the immediate operation.

This incident has been in my mind for 30 years. What if I hadn’t read that chapter in the textbook? What if I was too scared, too insecure, and too ________ to ask the real doctor for help?

8 . As my son entered adolescence, we spent most of our time in separate rooms. I know it’s _______ for teenagers to shut themselves away, but sometimes I find myself trying to think up ways to _______ him out of his bedroom.

_______ by this desire, I booked two tickets to Beijing for the September school holidays. With hurriedly packed luggage and a basic plan built around some last-minute Google searches, we _______ the airport. We landed _______ and excited at 4: 30 am. There is something very freeing about arriving in a place where you have no _______. We just walked for hours every day, _______ when we were hungry, wandering back streets, sharing more _______ than we’d shared since he was very little. Within a day he’d become the _______ , and I was the lost one. He taught me how to ________ shared electric bikes when we arrived at Xiangshan. He showed me how to accelerate and led me speeding up and down hills.

I saw him ________ in China, not the child running late for school or forgetting to eat carrots and peas, but as someone taller than me who understood when to ________ on a train so someone older could take his seat, and how to ________ buying things with his own money.

Travelling meant we were more like ________. And instead of complaining about the ________ version of him, I saw the adult he was becoming.

9 . Last summer I talked with my daughter studying in her last year in high school about her graduation album. I asked which _________ she selected to take her pictures for it. She told me she _________ no one, adding she’d rather have a friend or family member snap a few candid (抓拍的) shots and _________ from them. It would be a good idea to me since she _________ available photos of herself, and it would be a _________ to spend hundreds of dollars and have her like none of the photos. Of course, I asked her several times to be _________ afterwards.

After two _________ she still didn’t like any of the photos I took for her very much and told me she wasn’t submitting one for the graduation album. As the _________ was fast approaching, I warned her that the school might use her _________ from her school ID and asked again if she was certain she wanted to go this route. Her answer was __________ so I decided to let it go.

Yes. I could have picked a photo my daughter didn’t like and submitted it behind her back, but I knew it wouldn’t have __________ well. So I didn’t do that.

My daughter is __________ enough to make such a decision on her own. It’s her senior year. The fact that she doesn’t want to __________ a senior portrait for the graduation album doesn’t __________ there’s anything wrong with her. I need to let her do her thing.

I had my senior year and did it the way I wanted. Now it’s my daughter’s __________.

10 . In the back of my closet, there is a small cardboard chest that has followed me to every one of my new addresses. Until now, the only _________ contents in it are three wrapped _________ marked in my mother’s tidy handwriting: “Engagement”, “Wedding” and “First Baby”.

When I was three, my mother learned that she had advanced breast cancer. When I was seven, she had begun _________ a gift box for me. Inside, she packed presents and letters for the _________ of my life she was going to be missing — driver’s license, graduation, and every birthday until the age of 30.

My mother died ten days before our _________ birthday. That morning, when I turned 12 and she would have turned 49, I woke up early and opened the package _________ “12th Birthday”. A white card curling around the present _________: “I always _________ a birthstone ring when I was a little girl. Your Granny finally bought me one and I loved it more than I can say. I hope you like it, too.” I put on the ring and _________ her writing with my fingertip.

On the morning of my high school graduation, a __________ of pearls appeared as I opened the wrapped present. Her note read: “There seemed to be a __________ in my family that when girls graduated from high school, they received pearls.” I wore the pearls that afternoon as I took the stage to accept my diploma.

Year after year, my mother __________ forward in time to meet me. When I was a child, opening the next package felt like a treasure __________. As I grew older, her message met me like guideposts in a dark forest. If her words couldn’t point the way, at least they offered the __________ of knowing that someone had been there before and that I have been __________, wildly loved.