1 . My wife and I moved into our home two years ago. We had a yard with a lot of ________. Very often when we have flowers, Denise or I would plant some between the rocks, just to add some ________ to the area.

Last summer, I found a tiny little plant in the yard that I could not immediately identify. I knew I didn’t plant it and Denise said she didn’t either.

We decided to let it ________ growing until we could find out what it was.

Weeks passed and as I made my way back to the ________ plant, it appeared to be a sunflower. I decided to ________ the weeds (杂草) around it. As I pulled rocks from the area to get to the weeds, I noticed something ________.The sunflower had not ________ where I saw it begin. It actually had begun under a big rock and grown under and around it to reach the ________.

That’s when I ________ that if a tiny little sunflower didn’t let a big rock stand in its way of developing, we too have the ability of doing the same thing. If we ________ ourselves like that little sunflower, we can reach where we ________ to go and get what we need for growth.

We need to believe in ourselves knowing we have the ________ to achieve our goals. Like the sunflower, it knew it had the ability to get over the rocks because it had ________ in itself that it would succeed. Stand tall like the sunflower and be ________ of who and what we are, and then the environment will begin to ________ us. We will find a way to go under or around any “rocks” in order to reach our goals.

3 . I had a perfect childhood. _______ I saw was new, wonderful and exciting. I was _______ whether it was rainy or dry, whether it was hot or _______. I just wanted to _______ all the things around me.

But I can’t _______ time. When I reached my teens, I started to realize there was a different _______ of life. I no longer had enough time for little things－discovering a rainbow was not _______ , looking at a giraffe in the zoo was normal, and _______ a building with 50 floors was not amazing. A rainy day was a _______ day because the traffic was slow, and the first day of spring ________ me of aller­gies (过敏). Life moves on again. The first day of the month is not just the ________ of a new month; it’s the time to ________ bills. Going to the supermarket is a ________; it is not just fun walking around, looking for things and seeing the people around me.

Life is a ________ in which everyone has many obligations (责任), but if everyone tried to see life through the eyes of a child, I am sure that every day could be ________.

4 . A little girl created a perfect gift for her mother’s birthday. It was a drawing of a _______on white paper with the words “For mom: love, love, love” decorated with hearts. She folded (折叠) her letter, but then she _______it.

For most people, that would be the _______ of this story, but this story had a different result. James Carrell found the letter. He had just_______ his mother, wishing her a happy birthday. After he hung up, Carrell saw the _______ on the ground outside of a hardware store in Manvel. “I _______ it was a gift,” said Carrell. “I opened it up and saw the flower and hearts. It really _______ me.” Carrell thought the letter would _______ someone’s day and that maybe he could find the owner, so he posted it on the Internet. The message moved a lot of people, _______ one man.

“I was sitting at my friend’s house and saw a man’s ________,” said Carrell.

The comments included one from Robert Alvarado. He wrote, “I can’t ________ you found my baby’s letter.” Carrell reached Alvarado to ________ the letter. It took a few days, but the men finally met on Thursday night.

“Eventually the letter made it home,” said Alvarado. “We are ________ for what James Carrell did.” We often forget the power of ________ things, but for this family from Alvin, Carrell’s small act left a ________impression.

6 . Twenty years ago, I drove a taxi for a living. One night I went to _________ a passenger at 2:30am. When I arrived to collect, I found the building was dark except for a single _________ in a ground floor window. I walked to the door and knocked. “Just a minute,” answered a _________, elderly voice.

After a _________ pause (停留), the door opened at last. A small woman in her eighties stood before me. By her side was a small suitcase. I took the suitcase to the car, and then _________ to help the woman. She took my arm and we walked _________ toward the car. She kept thanking me for my _________ .”It’s nothing,” I told her. “I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated.’’

“Oh, you’re such a good man,” she said. When we got into the taxi, she gave me a/an _________ , and then asked, “Could you drive through downtown? ”

“It’s not the shortest way,” I answered quickly.

“Oh, I’m in no hurry,” she said. I’m on my way to a hospice (临终医院). I don’t have any _________ left. The doctor says I don’t have a chance of living very long. I quietly reached over and shut off the meter (计价表). For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She __________ me the building where she had once worked, the neighborhood where she had lived, and the furniture shop where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she’d ask me to __________ in front of a special building and would sit looking straight into the __________ , saying nothing.

At dawn (黎明), she suddenly said, “I’m tired. Let’s go now.”

We drove __________ to the address she had given me.

“How much do I pay for you?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. “You have to make a living ,” she answered .

“Oh, there are other passengers,” I answered. Almost without thinking, I bent and gave her a __________.

She held onto me tightly. Our hug ended with her remark, “You gave an old woman a little moment of __________.”

7 . It’s hard being an astronaut’s son, I _________, everybody expects you to be special or _________, but I’m just an average student.

I often wonder _________ my father ever had a son like me. I mean he’s so _________ and so good at everything. So I used to dream about doing something spectacular (令人印象深刻的) to _________ my father.

In one class, my teacher _________ a Father’s Day essay contest for us and the winners’ essays would be read in front of all the parents and students. After school I walked home, _________ about my father, who I would write about in my essay.

He sat with me in the _________ when I was a little kid and had a nightmare. He _________ me with a new puppy at my eighth birthday party. To me, he wasn’t a world-famous astronaut, but just my dad.

I wrote about all these __________ in my essay. One of our neighbours said, “I __________ you’ll win the contest, David. You’re the only one in town whose father is an astronaut.” I didn’t want to win __________ because my father was an astronaut.

I won the second prize. When I finished reading my essay, the __________ applauded. I saw my father blowing his nose.

Dad nodded to me, __________ his throat, and put his hand on my shoulder. “Son, this is the __________ moment of my life,” he said.

It was the proudest moment of my life, too. Maybe I’ll never be a great hero or win a Nobel Prize, but just then, it was enough just to be my father’s son.

8 . So far, many dolphins worldwide have been captured and kept in small pools, performing for people, especially kids. These dolphins are fed on fish instead of having to _______them. Gradually, they start spending most of their time near the pool waiting for food rather than underwater. They get out of shape and can no longer _______for long distances, which affects their_______ greatly, and results in _______ consequences (后果).

Thus comes the question. “Should captive (被关起来的) dolphins be _______?” Jeff Foster, a dolphin expert, decided to help two captive dolphins, Tom and Misha, to reach their top physical_______. Every day, he trained the two dolphins to get used to their wild homes again. Twenty months later, Tom and Misha began to act like _______ dolphins and they were set free back into the sea.

_______Tom and Misha lived in captivity for 4 to 5 years, they were able to adapt to the wild. It was _______ what Foster had hoped for. His dreams for the dolphins had finally come true and he knew that the dolphins would ________ in the wild.

This program was successful, but there have been other failures. For example, another dolphin, Keiko, returned into the ocean in 2002, but________ a year later because of all the misery (痛苦) he ________ in the past. The sudden ________change did not suit him well.

If people want to avoid these accidents, we must go to great lengths and put ________to ensure it doesn’t happen ever again. In fact, with virtual reality technology picking up, there can still be great ways to ________ kids with sea animals without having to capture them.

9 . Stephen Glenn is a famous American research scientist. He has made several very important medical ________. When a newspaper journalist asked him why he was able to be so much more creative than the average person, he responded that it all came from a(n)________with his mother that occurred when he was a child.

Stephen had been trying to remove a bottle of milk from the refrigerator when he________ his grasp on the slippery bottle and it fell, spilling(泼出)its contents all over the kitchen floor—a real sea of milk!When his mother came into the kitchen, instead of punishing him, she said, “What a great and wonderful________you have made! I have rarely seen such a huge pond of milk. Well, the________ has already been done. Would you like to get down and play in the milk for a few minutes ________          we clean it up?”

Indeed, he did. After a few minutes, his mother said, “Stephen, whenever you make a mess like this, ________you have to clean it up and restore everything to its proper order.” And together they cleaned   up   the   spilled   milk.   His   mother   then   said,   “You   know,   what   we   have   here   is a ________experiment in how to effectively carry a big milk bottle with two tiny hands.”

Let’s go out in the back yard and fill the bottle with water and see if you can discover a way to carry it without ________ it. “The little boy learned that if he grasped the bottle at the top near the lip with both hands, he could ________ without dropping it. What a good________to him!” This famous scientist then remarked that it was at that moment that he knew he didn’t need to be afraid to make________. Instead, he learned that mistakes were just________for learning something new, which is, after all, what scientific________are all about. Even if the experiment doesn’t work, we usually learn something________from it.