2 . A parent’s hopes for 2030

When 2010 arrived, my son was only a year old—tiny and _________, the master of a few basic words, but still mostly the baby we’d welcomed into the world. Now my baby has grown into an _________—tall, strong, and smart, a lover of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies.

A _________ from now, in 2030, he will be an adult. I expect the next 10 years to fly by, and be filled with _________. As 2020 begins, I am thinking about the kind of world my son will face and experience. I _________ about him, and about all the young people of his age. So I have several hopes for the world my son and his generation will live in.

I hope we finally get _________ about climate change. Polar ice is melting. The oceans are rising. The question is _________ whether we can stop climate change, but whether we’re willing and able to do anything to _________ it.

I’m not sure what a warming planet will _________ to my son’s life. I suspect it means he will live in a world where nations and groups __________ limited resources like clean water and food, which means that the danger of climate change won’t come just from rising oceans, but from humans’ competing for control over what’s __________.

The world is always going to be full of __________ about how to solve the challenges we face. I hope, too, that my son’s generation learns to __________ justice—but to do so with a big heart and humility, recognizing our common humanity even with people who __________ us.

The world of 2030 won’t __________ itself. We are creating it now, so my final wish is that we build the kind of world we actually want our children to live in.

3 . Space exploration has always been the province of ________: The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity (聪明才智)struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries ________the first manned rockets started to fly.  

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the________’s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous ________ speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and________American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up ________each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的)and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is figuratively and literally otherworldly in its ________.  

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no________. The perpetual argument is that ________ are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit, reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury—________ saving one-thousandth of a single year’s budget would solve our problems.  

But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, ________out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom-up assault on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within ________ of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.  

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us—not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off ________ they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can ________what were once considered inherent limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is ________greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

4 . More than a decade ago, I wrote a letter to myself—A Letter to My Future Self._________, I put it away and completely forgot about it. It wasn’t until 16 years later that I _________ it again. I decided to open it. This is _________ it said:

Dear Sherri,

When _________ this letter, you will be 32. At the age of 18 I have so many hopes and _________ about where you’d be, what you’d be doing and with whom you’d _________your life.

Right now, I hope that you have _________ to many countries and maybe even settled down _________ in Australia doing some research in the field of _________. I hope you’re married to the man of your dreams. The man of mine is Gwynn. You’ll __________ have two children of your own—a girl and a boy.

If everything goes __________ plan, you’ll be living in Australia in a big house with Gwynn and your two beautiful __________. Hopefully you have a career __________ the medical field, maybe doing research in genetics. However, if things doesn’t __________ as planned, I wish you all the love, __________ and joy in the world.

Live long, be happy and __________ life!

Love Sherri “18”

After reading it, I find it __________ to see how the dreams of a young girl could come true. I’m curious if you have __________ written anything to your future self. If you haven’t, will you __________ me in writing a letter now to yourself 10 years from now? It’s an interesting __________.