Ronaldo Luiz Nazario de Lima was born on 22 September 1976 in a poor suburb of Rio de Janeiro. Like most of his childhood friends, Ronaldo began his football (soccer) career playing barefoot in the streets of his neighbourhood. At the age of 14, he joined Sao Cristovao football club and only two years later became the star of Cruzeiro Esporte Clube in Belo Horizonte     1     a total of 58 goals in 60 matches and earning himself a reputation for his explosive pace and     2     finishing skills. His goal — scoring record and unusual quickness led him to be     3     in the Brazilian World Cup winning team the following year. After the World Cup, many top European football clubs were trying to     4     him. Many people, including Brazilian football legend Pele, considered him as the most     5     footballer of his generation.

Since his     6     to Dutch team PSV Eindhoven, Ronaldo’s biography has been one success after another. Two Copa America’s, a UEFA Super Cup, a Dutch Cup, a Spanish Super Cup, and two Player of the Year awards from FIFA, all in the space of two years, are some of Ronaldo’s impressive     7    . On arrival to Inter Milan in 1997, Ronaldo became the idol of the local fans who refer to him as “il Fenomeno (奇才)”.

Since the 1998 World Cup he has suffered serious knee injuries that have severely limited his     8    . Just when people began to wonder whether Ronaldo would be able to continue with his football career, he     9     to the world that he still could play. In the World Cup held in Korea and Japan, the magical striker won the Golden Shoe award and tied Pele’s Brazilian record for career World Cup goals with 12. He helped Brazil     10     its fifth World Cup championship on 30 June with a 2-0 win over Germany. It was the third time that Ronaldo had ever played in the World Cup.

5 . Every table tennis player has a memorable and unforgettable childhood. Ma Long is the _________. Ma Long won his first cup of table tennis in the city of Anshan. Maybe in 1995 or 1996, he did not remember the _________ time. Anyways, it was within 2-3 years since he first _________ the racket (球拍). This is _________ of him, who remembers clearly the matches that he _________ but not those that he won. It is known that Ma Long does not want to lose any match; the concept of win and loss was _________ when he was in Anshan.

At the age of 13, Ma Long was brought to Beijing to have a _________ more formal training. In 2003, Ma Long _________ into the Chinese National Team. And his first world Singles title came in 2004 after winning the World Junior Championships. At age 18, Ma Long also became the youngest world champion.

The first impression on Ma Long is usually a _________ person. Even after winning a certain match, Ma Long speaks little _________ the rush and excitement. Aside from being silent, Ma Long is also a very shy person. He would easily blush whenever he is being teased by his teammates.

Just like most of the kids, Ma Long would cry _________ he losses in the game when he was still young. In addition, Ma Long also had a hard time _________ his disappointments outside the matches. _________ now, Ma Long uses his frustration as his _________. He already has the _________ to face anyone after losing a game.

Closer to Equality

Left. Right. Left. Right again.

Getting lost in the rhythm of my turns was one of my favorite parts of skiing. Whenever I feel the soft, powdery snow beneath my skis, I feel like I’m capable of     1    .

I started skiing when I was just three years old. While the other children in my group     2     (mess) around, I was busy rolling down the small slopes. Although there were many difficulties, I soon mastered the basic concepts     3     (underlie) the art of turning.

I decided to take my skiing     4     the next level and joined a team when I was seven. Riding the chairlift with my mother, I saw free skiers spinning through the air. I immediately knew which team I wanted to join: free skiing, an event heavily     5     (dominate) by boys.

As soon as I joined the team, I was placed at its       6     (low) level. However, I never stopped climbing the rankings     7     I was placed into the highest group. At that point, I was the only girl on my team. I was put down at first; nobody wanted to ride the chairlift with me. But as time passed, I slowly became more accepted. And this entire process took three years.

In the past, having been forced to assume the roles of stay-at-home and motherly figures, women couldn’t imagine       8     they wanted to be. Even today, in some countries, there are still so many cases     9     people are not yet accepting the idea that women can make their own choices or pave their own paths. But if we are to fully accept these views, we will be able to move closer to equality.

Being a girl in such a sport can be difficult, but I’m actually thankful that my experiences have taught me to face whatever setbacks I meet with in life. I encourage you, all the girls,     10     (step) out of your comfort zone to show the boys that girls are just as powerful as they are.

Just Focus on Your Own Way

Head held high as she took the court moments after her Chinese team entered the arena, she waved and smiled in several directions. She then paced around the floor observing China’s championship opponents from Serbia (塞尔维亚). She     1     sang through the national anthem, guided her team to defend the title and made her own history, too. Lang Ping became the first person to win back-to-back World Cup championships both as a player (1981,1985) and as a coach (2015, 2019).

Lang, a significant cultural icon in China, rose to    2     as a volleyball player in the early 1980s. She, along with her teammates, was     3     four-time world champions in international competitions between 1981 and 1985. This    4     of victories pushed women’s volleyball to the forefront of Chinese sports discussions. Before this time, only table tennis had taken on a characterization as the sport in which the Chinese boasted about an outright     5    . As the leading outside hitter (主攻手), Lang herself was honored as the MVP of women’s volleyball at the 1984 Olympics.

After she retired from playing, Lang moved to the United States to experience what she called a “normal life”,     6     herself from her national fame. In 1987, she started coaching the women’s volleyball team at the University of New Mexico. Having honed her coaching skills with these young athletes over a five-year period, Lang became the head coach of China women’s national team in 1995.   She     7     led the team to a silver medal at the 1996 Olympics and a second place at the World Championship two years later. In 2005, Lang set her sights on a new challenge: coaching the U.S. women’s national volleyball team. The first foreign female to coach a major sport for the United States, she devoted herself to the job, despite     8     criticism back home. Lang returned to coach the Chinese national team for the second time in 2013. After guiding the team to the gold medal at the 2016 Olympics, she became the first person in volleyball history to     9     Olympic titles both as a player and as a coach. However, when asked about her success, Lang just said, “It’s not important for me to make history. But I’m so happy for the girls. They trained very hard.”

Lang’s     10     life is displayed in a recently announced documentary entitled The Iron Hammer, named after her nickname. The film not only tells her story but showcases her internal strength and commitment to greatness in the sport. Furthermore, her ability to break down gender barriers has inspired women to achieve new heights in the sport, a legacy that still inspires hope in the youth of today.

Female Grandmaster—Hou Yifan

Even by the standard of chess geniuses, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game     1     with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mentioned two big hairpins that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt     2     or limitations,” she told me recently from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen university’s Faculty of Physical Education.

“My parents never told me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days her hair falls to her shoulders and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and     3    . She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the     4     of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete versus the number of men who do: around sixteen percent of tournament players are     5     as female and most of them are children. As a purely     6     matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extreme of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the inequality at the top of the game, about which Hou is     7    . “You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen,” she told me, of the absence of women from chess highest echelon(梯队). For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child she     8     a chess set in a shop window and liked the shapes of the pieces. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher and showed enough talent that her parents     9     her a year early in the local school which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings on a sheet of paper. Then they would set up their boards, dutifully     10     their copied instructions and launch their wild attacks.

She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team and won the girls under ten championship in 2003. In the next year, she finished boys under ten tournament tied for first.

10 . “It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,” Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman once told an audience. Not only is that view apparently false, but “it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist. The great difficulty is in trying to imagine something that you have never seen, that is consistent in every detail with what has already been seen, and that is different from what has been thought of;furthermore, it must be definite and not a vague proposal.” Imagination takes the stuff of observation and experience and recombines them into something new.

In 1968, the high jump was a well-established sport. You would run, you would jump, and you would make your way over a pole in one of several ways. In older days, you’d likely use the scissors, scissoring out your legs as you glided over, but by the sixties you’d probably be using the straddle or the belly roll, facing down and basically rolling over the bar. Whichever style you used, you’d be facing forward when you made your jump. Imagine trying to jump backward. That would be ridiculous.

Dick Fosbury, however, didn’t think so. All through high school, he’d been developing a backward-facing style, and now, in college, it was taking him higher than it ever had. He wasn’t sure why he did it. He didn’t care what anyone else was doing. He just jumped with the feeling of the thing. People joked and laughed. Certainly, no one expected him to make the U.S. Olympic team — let alone win the Olympics. But win he did, setting American an Olympic records with his 7-foot-4.25-inch (2.24-meter) jump, only 1.5 inches short of the world record.

With his unprecedented technique, called the Fosbury Flop, Fosbury did what many other more traditional athletes had never managed to accomplish: he revolutionized, in a very real way, an entire sport. Even after his win, expectations were that he would remain a lone bird, jumping in his esoteric style while the rest of the world looked on. But since 1978, no world record has been set by anyone other than a flopper; and by 1980, thirteen of sixteen Olympic finalists were flopping across the bar. To this day, the flop remains the dominant high jump style. The straddle looks old and awkward in comparison. Why hadn’t anyone thought of replacing it earlier?

Fosbury wasn’t even a particularly talented jumper. It was all in the approach.