1 . I remember vividly the moment the doctor told me my daughter Annabelle was severely disabled. A thousand ________ raced through my mind. Will she walk? Will she talk? Will she be able to read?

“I couldn’t possibly ________,” said the doctor “But you should prepare yourself for the fact that she might never walk or talk.”

As well as ________ health, I wondered if she would have friends.

Now I know some of the answers. Although she has problems with the spine (脊柱), she can walk huge distances. She can’t hold a ________, but she can make her wants and needs known. And she has no friends.

Annabelle doesn’t get invited to birthday parties. To me, it’s this lack of inclusion (被接纳) that really ________me. Therefore, I was ________ when I saw a post on social media from a little girl with Down’s syndrome (唐氏综合症) at her friend’s birthday party. She was ________ having the greatest time of her life. There were photos of her wearing a wide smile, ________ for the camera, her friend’s arms around her.

“This is amazing!” I wrote, “I am so glad she gets________ in everything. My little girl was born with a spine problem. She hasn’t been invited to a single party in the last four years. ________ my heart.”

Later that day, a woman called Caroline, who I’d never met, sent me a message. Her son Luca was having a fifth birthday party and he wanted to ________ Annabelle.

As Annabelle set off for the party, she felt ________ and became hesitant. But once inside, she was relaxed and felt included in every element by two ________ — a five-year-old boy and his mum. It was highly ________.

My daughter now has memories that will last her a lifetime ________ that, she has her first ever friend.

2 . Of all the ways to define (定义) a challenge, the simplest works best: a call for special effort. It applies to everyone. It’s not enough to say that skiing a black diamond is a challenge; or that snowshoeing a 10-kilometr e route is a challenge. For some, neither may be. For others, both are unimaginable.

A call for special effort means only you know when you’re being challenged. If you’re red-faced and out of breath, it’s probably a challenge. If you have to focus and work hard to complete the task, consider yourself challenged.

This season, we sourced 10 of the most exciting winter challenges around Canada. Sure, there are some that even the writer has no intention of trying, but they all excite the imagination. They’re all about inspiring outdoor experiences at Explore^TM. We encourage adaptation as well as adoption.

When you read the feature (专栏) on page 28, you may give up the 6633 Arctic Ultra as well as the Ice Mile—but the Wapta Traverse, the famous Rocky Mountain ski tour, or the Pentathlon des Neiges, in Quebec City, may fit the bill nicely. Or maybe it’s a day-tour in the Rockies and sampling just one of the Pentathlon sports in a more relaxed setting. It’s up to you.

We wrote this article because we want you to see the possibility of winter: to look beyond a simple, though satisfying, day on the ski hill or skate on a nearby lake; to see winter as every bit as colorful as summer.

3 . New York Times best-selling author Susan Casey travelled globally, joining scientists and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet. She takes us on an interesting journey through the history of deep-sea exploration, from the legends of the ancient world to storied shipwrecks we can now reach on the bottom. Throughout this journey, she learned how important the deep is to the future of the planet, and how necessary it is that we understand and protect it. The Underworld is Susan Casey’s most beautiful and thrilling book, a wonderful show of the natural world.

Event location: The lecture and book signing (签名) will be held at the Linda Hall Library,5109 Cherry Street, Kansas City, Missouri.

Event time: Thursday, January 14th,7:00 pm-8:00 pm

Book signing: Hard copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event courtesy of Rainy Day Books. A book signing will immediately follow the lecture.

Admission package (admits one)

Click to order tickets through the Kauffman Center. Admission is $40.00 plus Kauffman ticket fee and includes one hardcover of the book and one admission ticket. Reserved seating.

Please note: Attendees (参与者) will receive their books as they arrive at this event. Your electronic ticket will be needed for event entry and to receive your hardcover of the book as you arrive.

Disclaimer (免责声明): All Rainy Day Books Author Event sales are final and non-refundable.

5 . The most powerful hurricane in the year was crashing into coastlines in Virginia. Lucky Dog Animal Rescue planned to take the 21 dogs, affected by the disaster, to a ________ in South Carolina, which became crowded as people near the coast were evacuating.

Mirah Horowitz is the head of Lucky Dog in Arlington, Virginia. “It’s a double ________,” she said. Her group found it hard to help the dogs as well as drive them from Virginia to South Carolina ________ a seven-hour trip. Then they have to put dogs in wooden boxes and bring them to the Washington, D.C., area. Finally, they had to make sure there were enough families to ________ the dogs.

The group tried to ________ more dogs from South Carolina over the weekend. They were going to hold an adoption (领养) event on September 8 at the shelter in the Washington, D.C., area. Horowitz and her colleagues decided to take some dogs and emailed ________ that night looking for families to adopt the dogs. “We had to find people to take those animals between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.” Horowitz said. ________, they were getting many replies until 2 a.m. from people who were willing to help, after hours of ________ waiting.

Lucky Dog was also talking to an animal shelter on the island of Grand Bahama in the Bahamas. That was where the hurricane had caused the most ________ so far. The workers there did not know the dogs’ situations. ________, they heard reports of heavy flooding that had ________ the shelter. Horowitz’s group also has a helicopter which is ready to offer flights to ________ some emergency supplies.

Horowitz said, “I really ________ the help from those families. It feels nice to save animals from areas ________ by severe weather and it is ________ to make all the efforts.”

6 . In September, when UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay visited Zhoukoudian in suburban Beijing, which is famous for the discovery of Peking Man living between 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, she was full of praise for the structure that successfully protected Yuanrendong Cave from an unusual rainstorm in July.

The cave in the central area of the site has so far revealed the remains of 40 individuals. The structure protects the site from the weather, including heavy wind, snow and hail, and its design fits in with the surrounding environment, Qin Changwei, secretary-general of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO, said at the 2nd World Cultural and Natural Heritage Forum in Beijing on Nov. 17 and 18. “It provides a reference for the protection of precious cultural relics, and suggests measures for helping heritage sites respond to the influence of climate change.”

Organized by the World Heritage Institute of Training and Research for the Asia and the Pacific Region under the Auspices of UNESCO(Beijing), and the China Foundation for Cultural Heritage Conservation among others, the forum brought together some 50 professionals to discuss the protection and sustainable (可持续发展的) development of heritage sites. Scholars stressed the influence of climate change on heritage sites, and offered suggestions for how to solve the problem.

“Entering the 21st century, climate change has been the subject of in-depth discussion by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. Questions like how to balance between humans and nature, how to respond to natural disasters caused by climate change, and what new challenges this brings to World Heritage Sites, are worth consideration,” says Qin. “Solving the problem requires us to unify, making full use of advanced technology, such as space and digital technologies, and jointly developing risk prevention and response plans,” he adds.

7 . Sleep is so important that it has long interested scientists. Scientists have studied everything from mice to fruit flies in the lab to get a better understanding of what happens when animals sleep and why they do it. However, gathering data (数据) on how animals sleep in their natural habitat has always been hard to do.

But scientists did just that with wild chinstrap penguins in Antarctica. In doing so, researchers found the birds took over ten thousand microsleeps throughout the day — adding up to a 11-hour-long sleep.

To study the penguins, scientists put devices (设备) into a small group of penguins’ brain and neck muscles, which provided the brain wave and location data. The devices had never been used before, so this data collection was only supposed to be a test. However, the process went so well and the data was published in this study.

Researchers found that the microsleeps last only seconds. Researchers think that being able to sleep for such a short time might help the animals avoid predators (捕食者) that might more likely attack if the penguins were asleep for longer — especially when one parent goes out feeding in the ocean for days, leaving the other parent to protect the eggs from predatory birds.

The study is an early insight into a relatively large missing scientific knowledge about sleep.

“Almost every study on sleeping birds discovers something new, something we didn’t know about before,” says study co-author Paul-Antoine Libourel.

Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, a sleep neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who didn’t join in the study, is excited about this new data because “most of what we know about the animal sleep was gained in laboratory conditions, which are totally different from conditions where sleep developed”.

8 . In the ever-changing world of women’s artistic gymnastics, there has been a gymnast for more than three decades: Oksana Chusovitina.

The 48-year-old had said with certainty that her final competition would be the Tokyo 2020 Games. With no fans in the stands to honor her legendary career (职业生涯) , judges, coaches and other athletes did their best to give her a party worthy of all she’d given the sport. After she thanked them through tears in her eyes, she told media that was her swansong.

However, just a few months after the Tokyo Olympics, Chusovitina said that she would return to training, dreaming of one final medal at a major competition —the Asian Games—for Uzbekistan. “I just can’t finish my career without a medal for my motherland,” she said on her Instagram story.

Chusovitina first competed in the 1992 Olympics as part of the Unified Team and won a team gold medal there. Though she represented (代表) Uzbekistan in the 1996, 2000 and 2004 Olympics, her second Olympic medal came some 16 years later in the 2008 Olympics. Chusovitina, then representing her third nation, Germany, where better medical treatment was provided for her sick son, got the silver medal.

And now, her story continues. The historic eight-time Olympian has started her ninth trip to the 2024 Paris Olympics. At the first two World Cup stops of the season she won bronze medals. “Thank you all so much for the support,” she wrote on Instagram. “First start, first medal.”

“More to come,” added the gymnast, whose motto is “I’d rather try today than regret tomorrow”.

9 . 听下面一段较长对话，回答以下小题。