2 . Like many young people, Jessica wants to travel the globe. Unlike most of them, this 25-year-old is doing it _______ . She and her husband have spent the last two years traveling the world, stopping everywhere from Paris to Singapore. It might sound like one long, expensive _______ , but the couple has an unusual way to make their travel _______ .

They’re part of a new form of the _______ economy: an online group of house sitters. Throughout their no-cost stays in _______ homes, they feed pets and water plants in the homeowner’s _______ .

It’s not all sightseeing. The two travelers carefully _______ their trips, scheduling their days around the pets that are sometimes difficult to _______ . But house sitting also offers a level of _______ they can’t find in a hotel. “It’s like ________ at a friend’s house,” Jessica says.

The couple has a high ________ rate in getting accepted as house sitters and they always go beyond the homeowner’s ________ . For Jessica, that means ________ plenty of pictures of happy pets, keeping the house ________ and leaving a nice small gift before heading to the next house. “You want to make the homeowner feel that they made the right ________ ,” she says.

3 . I've always loved mountaineering (登山) and the mental and physical challenges that go with it. This time the peak (山峰) of Mt. Whitney is my ______. There are quite a few ways up to the big mountain, but we ______ the traditional one at last, almost 12 miles to the top.

I decided to make this trip less about ______ and more about the climb and my personal journey with a friend. Thinking about it this way, I decided to carry only one camera to ______ the course, but it still added 3.2 pounds to my backpack, which ______ 2.8 pounds without the camera equipment. Fortunately, climbing with a friend ______ sharing the weight, keeping our packs a little lighter. Therefore, we ______ reached the top just two days later. This particular trip was prepared for a personal trip on purpose to get to the peak and enjoy the breathtaking ______.

Climbing such tall peaks ______ every aspect of you, as a nature photographer. It can test both your physical strength and photographic ______. Can you imagine being 14,000 feet up, ______ the thin air of the high-altitude (海拔) environment while also trying to be ______ with your compositions (作品)? That’s what we were doing! And that’s the joy that comes with climbing Mt. Whitney as well.

Like any other ______ in nature, there are risks in mountaineering, though, Extreme altitude and the unpredictable (无法预测的) weather will test even the most ______ climber. Despite the fact, mountaineering for me is all about the experiences, which makes me live to the ______.

5 . “It will be marvelous. It will be spiritual.” This is the ________ tagline that Virgin Galactic used in 2004 to attract potential customers to its planned space tourism services. It promised that, within five years, it would take a total of over 3,000 passengers on life-changing trips in its spaceships. On July 11, 2021, after a last 90-minute delay, Virgin Galactic finally began its fulfillment of that original ________. For four minutes, its six temporarily weightless passengers, including the firm’s British co-founder, Sir Richard Branson, saw the planet against the blackness of outer space.

Back on the ground, Sir Richard called the experience “magical”. He may have ________ the fact that he was able to reach space earlier than Jeff Bezos, a fellow billionaire but much wealthier. On July 20, Bezos would go slightly higher, for slightly less time, in a vehicle that had been built by his own spacefaring company, Blue Origin.

The two tycoons (大亨) are among a growing number of ________ who believe that space tourism’s time has come. Suborbital (亚轨道的) tourism is part of a broader space economy that has rapidly grown over the past decade ________ technological advances. However, it is highly ________ that this will be true.

For now, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic will offer ________ suborbital flights to paying customers. Blue Origin is focusing much more on the development of a large new rocket that will be used for the launching of satellites, on selling advanced rocket engines to other companies, and on bidding (投标) on NASA contracts such as the recently announced plan to send humans back to the moon. ________, Bezos doesn’t see Blue Origin as a provider of services to adventure-seekers.

Even this 4-minute suborbital travels have a(n) ________, apparently. A major survey found that nearly two in five people with a net worth of over five million dollars would consider paying $250,000, Virgin Galactic’s current price, for a ticket. The business could be ________, once regular flights begin to offset (抵消) the rockets’ development costs. But how fast and by how much is ________. Without tourist-friendly destinations to visit (the capacity of the International Space Station is strictly limited), orbital tourism, with its far higher ticket prices, will not be a huge earner.

Another challenge — and the industry’s biggest remaining uncertainty — relates to ________. History has shown that a disaster, ________ in the early stages of an industry, can set progress back by years. NASA ________ its plan to send the untrained to orbit in 1986 after a school teacher was killed along with the rest of the crew in the Challenger tragedy. It was another 15 years before the next untrained person would ________ the journey on a Russian craft.

6 . Borneo is home to some of the most extraordinary wildlife. Several years ago, I decided to go there for a visit. A local person offered to be my guide, which was a great bonus for me.

One day, my guide turned off the smooth road and took me across a ________ hillside instead. We picked our way carefully when ________, a Rafflesia (大王花) popped into my view among those stones. Oh, dear! More than ________, I bent down and put my nose practically inside the flower’s core.

________, to my surprise, it was only one of the ________ during the trip.

As I ________ the end of my trip, there was still something I had yet to see. We planned to ________ most feared creature there, the saltwater crocodile, which can grow to a ________ of 6 meters or more. When we shone a flashlight towards the muddy shore, little sounds ________ in the darkness as if something unseen underwater had broken the ________ Taking a second look, we spotted two greedy ________ just above the water line. As we drew near, it ________ and we saw clearly it was a crocodile. With great caution, we neared it and finally could ________ its true dimensions. It was a baby-no more than 0. 6 meter long. Aha, whatever, I could now report to the ________ back home, who had never been to Borneo, that I had ________ a hungry crocodile in the wild and lived to tell the tale.

The world out there is so fascinating. Don’t let work run your life. Why not step outdoors and enjoy the wonders nature offers to you?

7 . Before our round-the-world trip we always thought that in Peru visiting Machu Picchu would be our most amazing experience.

Although Machu Picchu is simply indescribable, it _________ out that a totally improvised (即兴的) adventure gave us a much stronger _________. When we were staying at a Couchsurfer’s place in Cusco, we _________ him whether it would be _________ to visit a real Quechua village.

He said we could _________, although we would have to find it out ourselves since these Quechua _________live quite far in the Andes. _________, there’s no public transport to get there. In the end, we got very lucky. While_________ for transport, we found out that the local doctor and other social workers were going to _________ some of these tribes and they let us join them.

We were __________ happy because we had the chance to stay in a Quechua community. We __________ about their traditions, saw the colorful clothes they wore every day and __________ their daily routine for some time. We often had to use __________ to communicate, since most of these people don’t speak Spanish, only Quechua. This is one of our most interesting travel __________ and a real heart-warming experience that we will never __________.

8 . Last summer, my grandma took our large family on a vacation to Tanzania for a few weeks. While we did spend a large amount of time _________ wildlife in the Serengeti national park, the most memorable part of the trip for me was _________ the local culture. I was moved by how friendly and _________ everybody there was.

Whenever we rode somewhere in the ‘safari trucks’, the local children would, at the sight of the trucks, rush to the side of the road to _________ and shout “hello”. I could tell by their huge smiles that they were really _________ at the sight of us, not just doing what they’d been told to do in front of tourists. We were happy to _________ a wave or a high five, too. At one point when our guide was showing us around a local village, a woman came over and started talking to us in the local language, which our guide _________ for us. The woman wanted to show us the baby rabbits that she was _________. She welcomed us into her house. I was very _________ by this. I would never think of inviting a stranger off the street into my house back in the United States.

After we saw the super-cute newborn rabbits, we continued through the village. At the next house, there was a family __________ fish over a fire for dinner. Our guide asked if he could buy some. While he ate his fish, the family invited us into their yard. Everybody’s attitude was so __________ from that of people back home, who now seemed boring and __________ . Things that seemed so unusual to me, like letting strangers into one’s house, are completely __________ to these people.

When the trip ended and we got back to the United States, I almost felt a __________ connection to the people I met in Tanzania than to the people at home. The time that I spent in Tanzania was the time in my life when I felt the most __________.