1 . My son Joey was born with club feet (足内翻). The doctors _______ us that with treatment he would be able to walk _______ — but would never _______ very well. The first three years of his life were spent in surgery, casts and braces._______ the time he was eight, you wouldn’t know he had a problem when you saw him walk.

In seventh grade he decided to _______ for the cross-country team. Every day he _______ with the team. He worked harder and ran more than any of the others — perhaps he _______ that the abilities that seemed to come _______ to so many others did not come naturally to him. Although the _______ team runs, only the top seven runners have the ________ to score points for the school. We didn’t tell him he probably would never ________ the team, so he didn’t know.

He ________ to run four to five miles a day, every day — ________ the day he had a 103-degree fever. I was ________, so I went to look for him after school. I found him running all   ________. I asked him how he felt. “Okay,” he said. He had two more miles to go. The ________ ran down his face and his eyes were glassy from his ________. Yet he looked straight ahead and kept running.

Two weeks ________ , the names of the team runners were called. Joey was number six on the list. Joey had made the team. We never told him he shouldn’t ________ to make the team. We never told him he couldn’t do it...so he didn’t know. He just ________ it.

3 . From childhood, Diane loved to write. Throughout school she_______ writing, but pursuing it_______ was never a possibility. Her father was a doctor, her mother was a nurse. “Medicine was a fairly_______ option,” Diane says. “And writing was a career where it wasn’t a _______ that you’d have high income.”

She became a doctor but still wanted to do some writing. However, being a doctor was so_______ that she didn’t take up writing until her thirties. She_______ a novel—a fictionalized version of her travels in China after university. She got excellent_______ . Diane sent it off to as many agents as she could find, and found one who wanted to _______ her. Suddenly, it seemed she was on her _______  as an author.

“I had one lengthy phone call with the agent where we ________all possible areas she thought needed ________. I worked on those and sent it back to her but didn’t hear anything.” It was not long ________ Diane found another agent who was________ if she was willing to rewrite it from the first person to the third person. She did the hard work and sent it off again. “I got back a really brief letter: ‘Thank you, I’m no longer interested.’ It was really________.”

A decade went by, and Diane found herself itching to write again, this time ________ for her own enjoyment. She ________ herself the challenge of creating a thriller and chose Western Australia as her setting.

As she was writing just for herself, something surprising began to happen. “The characters________ a life of their own; they started doing things I hadn’t thought about. It just________ out.” One day, an agent called from Australia. Three weeks later, Diane had a publication deal. Her novel Cicada was published in March.

“________ it hadn’t been published, I still gained so much from the________ ,” says Diane.

5 . Last Christmas while staying with my parents, I _______ upon some old love letters that my parents wrote to each other. These letters were all piled up in a basket, dirty and _______. Deciding to read and _______ them, I asked them if I could take the letters back to my Illinois home. They agreed.

As I opened each letter, all of them delicate with _______, I discovered a new page _______ unknown to me in this private _______ of my parents’ lives.

My father used to _______ in the army. So his letters were full of frontline _______ of the things about the war. Each of my mother’s letters was sealed with her 1944 magenta (紫红色的) lipstick kiss. I was _______ to these letters like a magnet (磁铁).

Just six weeks after our Christmas visit, Daddy became very ill and was hospitalized. This time, he was fighting a ________ kind of war. As I sat by his bedside, we discussed the ________. He told me how much receiving those lipstick-kissed letters had ________ to him when he had been so far from home.

It so happened that the next day would be February 14. I chose from the ________ letters the card my father had sent Mother in 1944 and brought it to my father’s bedside.

At his bedside, I joked with him, saying ________, “Today is Valentine’s Day, and I know you have been a little busy lately, but I’ve got you ________.” He became more ________ when I handed him the old ________. He carefully opened the card, and when he recognized it, his eyes filled with tears.

My father, in a voice tight with ________, read the loving ________ he’d sent to my mother fifty-six years earlier. And this time, he could read it to her ________.

8 . I woke up with only one thing on my mind: what to wear. A billion thoughts_________through my brain as wooden hangers moved back and forth. It was my first day of high school in a new State; first_________are everything, and it was necessary to impress the people who I’d spend the next four years with.

It wasn’t insecurity that_________me to madness but the fact that this was my third time being the new kid._________ moving does something to a child’s development. I_________to find reliable friends. But this time dad’s company_________my starting and finishing high school in the same place. This time mattered, which made me nervous.

I emerged proudly in a patterned dress after riding (扫荡) my closet. I felt just as_________as I stepped off the bus. But my jaw dropped to the floor when I found Mrs. Hutfilz, my English teacher, wearing the exact same_________as I did. I kept my head down and tiptoed to my seat, but the first day meant_________in front of the class, and__________it was my turn. I made it through my minute speech, until Hutfilz stood up,__________ adding she liked my style. All the __________that had accumulated from waking up in the morning surprisingly__________. The students raised heads as I shared my story. My smile__________as I giggled with my peers. After class, I stayed behind, sharing with Mrs. Hutfilz my previous understanding about coming into a new school and state. I was relieved to make a humorous and genuine__________with my first teacher in the coming days.

This incident __________me that these are the times to have fun, work hard, and make memories, not stress about the__________details. Looking back, the ten minutes I spent __________my speech were really not worth it.__________ my first period of high school may not have gone exactly the way I thought it would, Mrs. Hutfilz’s great sense of__________certainly made the day unforgettable in the best way.

9 . I used to hate being called upon in class mainly because I didn’t like attention drawn to myself. And _______ otherwise assigned（指定）a seat by the teacher, I always _______ to sit at the back of the classroom.

All this _______ after I joined a sports team. It began when a teacher suggested I try out for the basketball team. At first I thought it was a crazy _________ because I didn’t have a good sense of balance, nor did I have the _______ to keep pace with the others on the team and they would tease me. But for the teacher who kept insisting on my “_______ for it”, I wouldn’t have decided to give a try.

Getting up the courage to go to the tryouts was only the _______ of it! When I first started _______ the practice sessions, I didn’t even know the rules of the game, much _______ what I was doing. Sometimes I’d get __________ and take a shot at the wrong direction—which made me feel really stupid. __________ , I wasn’t the only one “new” at the game, so I decided to __________ on learning the game, do my best at each practice session, and not be too hard on myself for the things I didn’t __________“just yet”.

I practiced and practiced. Soon I knew the ________ and the “moves”. Being part of a team was fun and motivating. Very soon the competitive ________ in me was winning over my lack of confidence. With time, I learned how to play and made friends in the __________ — friends who respect my efforts to work hard and be a team player. I never had so much fun!

With my __________ self-confidence comes more praise from teachers and classmates. I have gone from ________ in the back of the classroom and not wanting to call attention to myself, ________ raising my hand—even when I sometimes wasn’t and not 100 percent __________ I had the right answer. Now I have more self-confidence in myself.

10 . Exercise and I had never had a good relationship due to my fear of sports. From a young age, my dad _______ me into a dozen sports. I didn’t like any of them, _______.

When I entered the University of Regina, my dad _______ telling me “You have to find a way to stay _______.” or “You don’t want to get the Freshman 15, do you?” So I _______ to give swimming a shot, but I _______ managed to go to the pool twice during the fall semester (学期). Worse still, I was _______ to convince myself that’s OK.

The spring semester came. A friend of mine _______ me if I wanted to try Zumba (尊巴) with her. All I knew about Zumba was that it was basically a kind of exercise: dancing to Latin pop songs. It didn’t sound too bad, but I couldn’t be _______.

I went, and that was it. Zumba became my ________ of tea. The instructor would always say, “Don’t worry about the steps. Have fun. Do your own thing.” That removed my ________ of sports. I didn’t have to be ________. I didn’t even have to be good. I just needed to ________ the music and move. Zumba did ________ me from the Freshman 15, and it also did so much more. It let me make ________ with my unpleasant past about physical exercise, and enjoy staying healthy.