2 . 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!

4 . 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.

5 . Bruno went into the kitchen and got the biggest surprise of his life. He could barely believe his eyes. “Shmuel!” he said. “What are you doing here in my kitchen?”

Shmuel looked up and his terrified face _________ a broad smile on seeing his friend. “Bruno!” he said. “They asked me to polish the glasses. They said they needed someone with tiny _________.”

He held his hand out and Bruno noticed that it was like the hand of the pretend skeleton. In reply, Bruno held his own hand out, which appeared _________ and full of life. The veins (血管) weren’t visible through the skin, the fingers weren’t little more than dying twigs (细枝). Shmuel’s hand, however, told a very _________ story.

“Shmuel! Here!” said Bruno, stepping forward and putting some slices of chicken in his friend’s hand. “Just eat them.” The boy stared at the food in his hand for a moment and then looked up at Bruno with wide and _________ but terrified eyes. He threw a _________ in the direction of the door and then thrust all the slices into his mouth in one go.

“Thank you, Bruno.” said Shmuel, giving a faint smile.

Bruno smiled back and was about to offer him more food, but just at that moment Lieutenant Kotler reappeared. Bruno stared at him, feeling the _________ grow heavy, sensing Shmuel’s shoulders sinking down.

_________ Bruno, Lieutenant Kotler marched over to Shmuel and glared at him. Shmuel looked up at Lieutenant Kotler, who frowned, leaning forward slightly as he examined the boy’s face. “You have been eating,” said Lieutenant Kotler. “Did you _________ something from that fridge?” Shmuel looked toward Bruno, his eyes pleading for __________.

“Answer me!” shouted Lieutenant Kotler.

“No, sir. He gave it to me,” said Shmuel, tears welling up in his eyes. “He’s my friend,” he added.

“Do you know this boy, Bruno?” he asked in a loud voice.

Bruno’s mouth __________ and he tried to say the word “yes”, but then he realized that he couldn’t because he was feeling just as __________ himself.

“Tell me, Bruno!” shouted Kotler, his face growing red. “I won’t ask you a third time.”

“I’ve __________ seen him before in my life,” said Bruno immediately, “I don’t know him.”

Hearing that, Shmuel wasn’t crying any more, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to __________ his soul not to live inside his tiny body any more, but to __________ away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was far away.

7 . Have you seen bees at work and stopped to wonder how smart they are? Results of a recent experiment prove that bees are clever enough to _______ time and energy when they fly around to different flowers.

Behavior

Nigel Raine, PhD, from Royal Holloway, University of London, has always been interested in finding out why animals behave as they do. He is also interested in bees. Therefore, it turned out to be not a _______ when he and some other scientists from Queen Mary University of London discovered that bees can quickly solve a problem that _______ computers many days.

A(n) _______ path

Flowers make pollen (花粉), and when bees visit them, they _______ the pollen to other flowers. The plants need the pollen to make seeds that will grow. Raine notes that we get a lot of our food from plants, so it is important to know how the bees move around and take pollen between flowers. The scientists wanted to _______ the journey that the bees take and how they save energy when they do this.

They completed the experiment on the roof of Queen Mary, using _______ flowers and a large amount of nectar (花蜜). They taught one bee to visit all these unreal flowers in one place at the same time. When the bee got to know the location of the flowers well, they saw how it flew around and returned home with the _______ . After this, they changed the locations of the flowers. The scientists thought the bee would follow the route it knew already, which would mean that it followed a longer route than it needed to, and so it would use more energy. They watched the bee carefully as it travelled between the flowers in their _______ location, and they made notes. To their ________ , the bee changed its route and flew a shorter distance.

Travelling salesman

The problem that the bee solved is similar to a math puzzle called the “travelling salesman problem”. A salesman who goes to ________ places to sell things wants to travel the shortest distance to do this. If he is going to visit many different places, it is not easy to ________ which is the shortest route. You have to calculate the length of many possible routes to find out which one is the shortest. A computer can calculate this but the experiment shows bees can do the same ________ quickly with a tiny brain.

Scientists are very interested in how they do this. It would help us to understand how pollen is moved around. ________ , if they find this out, it could help us to improve communication networks. This might help humans to ________ traffic jams when there is an accident, for example.

10 . I’m Grace, 13 years old and in seventh grade in Florida. I was in the six grade last year. That school year was _______. My family and I spent that year _______ all over Europe, seeing amazing places, meeting all kinds of people, understanding different cultures, and getting _______ in the process.

When my _______ decided to travel to Europe, we were excited. _______ we had a problem. We couldn’t rent a car that had enough _______ to work for our five-member family, so my dad bought a bigger one. It became our new _______ during the trip. I had to leave a lot of my things behind because so little of it would _______ into my tiny new room. We had to be careful to save our water. And we were doing homeschooling, _______ worked out great. We lived in a (n) ________ home, but my family ________ got along really well.

No matter what, I made sure to ________ my window every morning, because the view was ________ every day--- England, then France, Italy, Greece … each special in its own way. We toured around country after country, tried to pick up little bits of the local ________, but that didn’t help us much. Luckily, we kept ________ people who knew some English. Everywhere we went, we saw the most amazing things. I love reading about places, in my text-books and then getting ________ our car midway to look right at them. I can’t pick a favorite one, because every place we were at seemed to be the ________.

After our ________ ended, we moved back to Florida. But it makes me ________ that my family had this great year long ________ together. I’m thankful for that.