1 . Driving on a freezing morning, I passed a teenager with just a shirt and a cardboard with “ANYTHING HELPS” on it. This teenager was visibly _________. Remembering that there was an old blanket in my car. I stopped in _________, asked him if he needed a blanket and he _________ his head. So I handed him the blanket and slid back into my _________ car with my heated driver’s seat. I will never forget the look of _________ on his face.

I wondered how many homeless youths were _________ on the streets at that very moment. My family lived on a(n) _________ income, but my parents always taught me to give what I had. In that moment “The Blanket Project” was born.

I visited my parents at the retirement center and talked with the director _________ making blankets and scarves for the homeless. She loved the _________ and said the seniors wanted to help and be __________ in meaningful projects that weren’t complicated and could be __________ completed. Later on, the project __________ and more and more people became involved in it. One day, I was looking for places to __________ our scarves and was talking to a teacher whose students were from very-low-income homes. I asked her __________ she thought her students needed the scarves. She answered, “Yes, but let’s have them __________ some. The students could make a blanket or scarf to __________. ” Then the students worked in teams and made lots of scarves and blankets for a women’s homeless shelter.

When the students __________ me with their scarves and blankets, they were very __________ of what they had produced. I told them that everyone can make a(n)__________, no matter how much money they had. The __________ was dozens of proud smiles on the faces of the students who knew they had helped keep someone a little warmer and made the world a little better.

It was a Sunday and the heavy storm lasted all night. The morning before the storm, though, was beautiful: blue skies, warm air and a calm, inviting sea touching the shore gently.

My father realized it was a good day for fishing and invites my sister and me to go with him. I was only 14 and fishing had never been my thing, and I decided to go all the same. I'm so glad I did.

On the road to the harbor we could see the terribly destruction on the coast, but the harbor itself was in fairly good shape. After all, it protected by the arms of a bay that had only one tiny channel to the sea. As we got on the board, we noticed two big humps(脊背)in the distance.

On approached them, we saw it was a mother whale with his baby. We couldn't believe it—there aren't any whales along the coast here. The storm must have driven them across the ocean into the bay, in that the still water was such badly polluted that nothing could survive.

6 . The Amazon rain forest is on fire. There are more fires burning there than ever before. That's according to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research. Using satellites to track deforestation and wildfires, the agency has counted 74,155 fires in the Amazon this year. That's roughly an 84% increase over last year at this time. The effects of the fires are being felt across Brazil. Parts of the country are covered in smoke. In the state of Sao Paulo, heavy smoke caused the sky to go black and blocked the sun on Monday. Other Brazilian states have declared the situation an emergency. One state has been put on “environmental alert.”

Some people think the policies of Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, have led to the increase in fires. He wants to change laws that protect the Amazon so businesses can clear more land for commercial use. Bolsonaro says the fires are blazing simply because “it is the season of the queimada."(Queimada means "burned" in Portuguese. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil.)

But experts say Bolsonaro is wrong. They don't blame the increase in fires on the season. They point to deforestation and a worldwide increase in temperatures. “Trees, if they're stressed out by heat repeatedly, are more susceptible toother kinds of damage,” such as fires, says Deborah Lawrence. She's an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia.

Carlos Nobre is a Brazilian climate scientist. He's also an expert in tropical forests. The situation is “very sad,” according to Nobres. “We usually would see this surge of fire in very, very exceptionally dry years,” he says. “The fact that this record—breaking figure comes out in a relatively un—dry dry season shows that deforestation is increasing.”