1 . After accidentally sliding down the face of a steep rock wall, two tourists found themselves trapped by the edge of a deep pool in a British park. They knew they were in a(n)______situation.

Fortunately for them, five Sikh hikers who happened to be on the scene and______the incident used not only their heads but also their hats—or more______, their turbans(头巾)—to begin a pretty amazing______.

After carefully______the situation, and with no cellphone service to call for outside assistance, the group of international students ______the decision of unwinding the long turbans—their traditional headgear. They managed to fashion a 33-foot lifeline, with which they were eventually able to______the pair out of their situation.

Once the two hikers were pulled to______park officials stepped into______their condition. As neither required medical treatment, they were______with park officials’ permission and a warning to better______where they’re going next time.

Kinda and his four comrades, while more than pleased with their day’s work, were ______about their heroic action. “It was simply a(n)______of being in the right place at the right time and having the______to help,” they said. “In Sikhism, we are taught to help someone in any way we can with anything we______”Kinda said, “even our turbans.”

2 . MOOC, an open online course, aims at providing interactive discussion and open access via the web. In addition to _________ course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOC provide interactive user forums that help build a _________ for the students, professors, and teaching assistants.

MOOCs _________ made waves in the fall of 2011, when Professor Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University opened his graduate-level artificial intelligence course up to any student anywhere, and 160,000 students in more than 190 countries _________. This new kind of online classes is _________ the higher education world in many ways. Since the courses can be taken by hundreds of thousands of students at the same time, the number of universities might _________ greatly. Professor Thrun has even _________ a future in which there will only need to be 10 universities in the world. Perhaps the most _________ thing about MOOCs, many of which are being taught by professors at prestigious (声誉高的) universities, is that they’re free. This is certainly good news for _________ students.

There is a lot of __________ and fear about MOOCs. While some say free online courses are a great way to increase the __________ of minority students, others have said they will leave many students __________. Some critics have said that MOOCs encourage an unrealistic universal __________ of higher education and that there is no replacement for true dialogues between __________and their students. __________, a brain is not a computer. We are not __________ hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they __________ and remember the things that arouse emotion. Some __________ worry that online students will miss out on the social aspects of college. In other words, MOOCs __________social interaction among students and professors even if they are offered by professors from __________ universities.

4 . I’ll always remember a lesson that I learned as a boy growing up in New York City. One day, when I was perhaps six years old, I was walking with my father on a ________ street. All of a sudden, the flow of pedestrian traffic came to a stop as people tried to ________ a large object on the sidewalk. To my astonishment, the object ________ to be a human being, a man lying unconscious against a building. As we walked by, my father—the model of a loving, ________ gentleman—pointed to a bottle in a paper bag and told me that the poor soul on the sidewalk just needed to sleep it off. Then the drunken man began to murmur senselessly. My father ________ me not to go near, saying “you never know how he’ll react.”

Yet many years later I had a very different experience while visiting a market in Rangoon. I had spent the previous 12 months traveling in ________ Asian cities, but even by those standards this was a scene of misery (穷困). ________ desperate poverty and strong winds blowing dust ________, the locals had to live in the extremely hot climate with ridiculously huge crowds. ________ a man carrying a huge bag of peanuts called out in pain and ________ to the ground. I then witnessed an astonishing scene. Half a dozen ________ ran from their stands to help, leaving unattended what might have been the totality of their possessions. One put a blanket under the man’s head; another opened his shirt; the third one ________ him carefully about the pain; the fourth one ________ water; the fifth one kept onlookers from crowding around too closely; the sixth one ran for help. Within minutes a doctor arrived and two other locals joined in to assist. The ________ could have passed for a final exam at a nursing school.

I couldn’t help wondering, why people act ________ at the similar situation here?

6 . Girls are better at reading and writing than boys as early as fourth grade, according to a study, and the gap continues to widen until senior year.

Scientists generally agree that boys and girls are psychologically more alike than they are different. But reading seems to be a(n)________, with growing evidence suggesting a similar ________in writing. The study, published in the journal American Psychologist, provided further ________ to support this view.

David Reilly, lead author of the study, said the study ________the commonly held view that boys and girls start grade school with the same cognitive abilities. “It appears that the gender gap for writing tasks has been greatly________, and despite our best efforts with changes in teaching methods, that does not appear to be ________ over time,” he said.

Factors explaining the results could include learning ________ being more prevalent among boys; the pressure to conform to masculine (男子汉的) ideals and the idea of reading and language being feminine (女性的); and slight________in how boys and girls use their brain hemispheres (半球), the authors believe.

To investigate how ________ levels differed between boys and girls in the U.S., the team studied data collected over three decades in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. This database of test scores on over 3 million students in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades________national and state performances in a range of subjects, and considered such variables such as disabilities or whether children were English learners. Reading and writing was ________according to children’s understanding of a range of different passages and genres.

________, girls were found to perform significantly better in reading and writing tests by fourth grade when compared with boys of the same age. As children progressed to eighth and twelfth grades, girls continued to ________ boys, but the difference was more noticeable in writing than reading. But what caused this difference in abilities? Evidence suggests ________ problems, such as being disruptive（扰乱性的） in class or being aggressive could be linked to neurological conditions. What is known as lateralization (偏侧化) could also play a role. Boys are believed to use one hemisphere when reading or writing, while girls appear to use both. The data did not, however, provide evidence to argue ________ the two genders having different learning styles.

7 . Human brain cannot learns all by itself. We need to train ourselves to be better learners—to _______ take part in the learning process. These kinds of learning behaviors are called “active learning”.

There are two kinds of voices. Your inner voice expresses your _______ opinions, while the outer voice tells you about opinions from what you hear or read. Although your inner voice can be useful, it can also _______ in the way of learning. If you keep paying too much attention to it, you risk missing important information. Instead, active learners are open-minded and focus on what the speaker is saying, not on what their _______is saying in the background.

If you find your inner voice difficult to _______, you can argue with it as most active learners do. When your inner voice tells you a speaker is wrong, think about why the speaker may be right. Be flexible in your opinions and you might end up_______ the speaker after all.

Asking questions is the easiest way to _______ active learning. When you get information from someone, from books or the Internet, ask two, three, even five questions about the topic. The answers will lead you to further learning, and the very act of _______ questions will help you to achieve a higher level of understanding about the topic. In short: Do not stop being _______.

Active learners do not ________ everything they learn. They attempt to find the truth at the heart of each idea. Even when an idea sounds entirely ________, there may be an aspect of it that is based on truth. If you try to find out the source of an idea, no matter how crazy it seems, you will ________ your chance of learning something.

Many people refuse to learn what is said because of who the speaker is. It is true that we cannot help ________ some people. But do not forget you can still learn from them. Active learners do not ________ people based on first impressions or personal feelings. This ________ the other way as well — do not just assume that some people are always right just because they are your friends.

9 . Many years ago, I bumped into an old friend of mine. He had devoted his life to acting but had never been quite successful. In his middle age, he seemed_________ and sad.

I thought of his dogged（顽强的）_________. Was it smart or foolish? What could he have achieved had he quit his dream of acting and moved on? Our culture does not look_________ upon quitting. Failure is perfectly acceptable as long as it eventually_________in success.

We chant（反复喊着）“Winners never quit” and “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.” We _________stories of persistence, of the author who_________ stories for years before her novels were published or of the athlete who trained since childhood to win gold at the Olympics.

Persistence_________when it is rewarded with success, but it does not reward every person. For every JK Rowling, there are thousands of_________writers who will never get published. For every Olympic athlete, there are innumerable（无数的）others who trained every day of their lives and never _________.

We all agree that doing the same things and expecting a different result is__________. So why do we believe that persevering through failure after__________is a good idea?

We consider quitting in the face of failure to be __________. We believe that perseverance is the key to success. Perseverance is only one part of success. You need talent or skill, as well as passion and drive. Luck and timing are also key to any great success.

Our society believes that anything is possible, as long as you “believe”. But not everyone can make it. Quitting when you’re not __________is sometimes the smartest thing to do.

Obviously, if you enjoy a __________, regardless of its outcome, you should continue. If you knew your novel would never be published, would you want to write? If you could never be a champion swimmer, would you__________train? Sometimes, it is wise to put your energy into something else.

Failure is not always the path to success. Sometimes, failure is the door to something new.