1 . Dave had always loved the ocean. You wouldn’t believe how excited he was at Christmas when seeing a gift-wrapped _______   .

But when he began to surf, something _______ happened. Dave thought he knew the water well, but a big wave _______ him away. Dave felt powerless against the _______ in the deep water and lost confidence. Just then another surfer paddled (蹚水) up beside him. “Can I help you?” he asked. Dave _______ him. It was Mike. “I can help you back to shore.” he continued, “First, you need to _______ that fear and relax a little.” Dave began to relax his grip (紧抓).“Good,” said Mike. “Let the wave pick you up, then _______ your weight forward. As you start to build up speed, move your _______ back until you feel balanced. Just enjoy the ride.”

When Dave reached the _______ near the shore, he was bursting with excitement, fascinated that the current which had terrified him was seen as a helpful way by Mike. He had ________ this. He was right to be ________ of the big waves, but no longer did he feel out of his ________ .“Looks like you don't need me any longer,” said Mike. “You are a ________ . Have fun.”

Dave took a last wave, ________ it confidently to the shore. Watching the signs of the tide and the size of the waves, he realized they hadn't changed. It was he who was really different —stronger and more confident. The previous ________ had given way to joy and exhilaration.

2 . While it may seem impossible for a simple question to change everything, that is in fact my story. I was a relatively _________ person. I created a business. I was able to travel. Life was mostly _________. Even so, I often felt angry, sad and frustrated (沮丧), which many people would call a normal _________.

With my business, I often _________ expositions (展览会). During a visit to a Mind, Body, Spirit Expo in Australia, I _________ toward a stand sponsored by Access Consciousness. A very cute guy was standing there, so _________ I stopped to chat with him. He had a lot of _________ in his hands. He asked _________ I wanted to take one. I chose a piece of paper and _________ it, “Who does this belong to?” I had no idea what that meant so I __________. He explained, “Many people have those days when they __________ in the morning and instantly feel __________, depressed or any other similar emotions. If you feel __________ after asking yourself this question, those thoughts and __________ are not yours. You are just __________ the emotions of people around you.”

I __________ this question and discovered that most of what went on in my __________, the emotional reactions and stress were not mine. I was simply aware.

Today I’m a supporter of Access Consciousness. I’m __________ relatively happy, but rather happy. I have created multiple businesses, written books and __________ the world sharing with others the methods I use to keep myself __________. It all started with a simple question.

3 . Most airplanes are constructed with seats in rows of two or three Mathematically, someone in my family of five has to sit by a ________. I always ask to be that person and consider it the greatest ________ to meet someone remarkable.

From the time I could speak, I realized that overcoming communication ________ was an essential key to ________ the enormous potential in constructing meaningful relationships with others. My father is a successful scientist, but he has been ________ since birth. My childhood was spent understanding his intelligence while sometimes ________ to convey ideas because the words I chose were too ________ to lipread. But I learned how to employ my own approach to face the challenge. Gradually, I developed a ________ for communication skills.

Since kindergarten, I have loved Chinese culture. In my Junior year of high school, I ________ a competitive scholarship to study in China for the summer, learning Mandarin and the eastern culture. Dropped into Chengdu and ________ to speak the language fluently, I found myself a toddler (学步儿童). However, I didn’t quit. At the end of the program, I was voted to ________ the 500 scholarship recipients (被授予者) to deliver a speech in Chinese. My speech did win cheers. Finally, I returned home with a cultural awareness beyond expectation, possessing lifelong ________ with former strangers whom I now communicate with in Chinese.

Thanks to the strangers in my life, I learn that one must embrace (拥抱) certain new experience. I’m so ________ to confirm that stepping out of my comfort zone can, actually, ________ experiencing something from slightly interesting to life-changing. On the flight home from China I ________ chose to sit next to a stranger and it didn’t disappoint.

4 . Buried deep within the cracks of an old, wooden desk, a worn-out notebook lay forgotten. Its pages, yellowed with _________, were scattered with handwritten notes and drawings, each ________ a dream or aspiration of its owner, Emily Dickinson.

Dickinson, a ________ teacher, had passed away peacefully in her sleep, leaving the notebook as one of her few _________. There were drafts of traveling to foreign places, notes about learning a new language, and even a few ________ about publishing her own book of poems in it.

One ________ sketch caught her children’s eye as they looked through the pages. It was a drawing of a small cottage ________ in the hills, surrounded by greenery and a stream. Dickinson had always dreamed of retiring to such a place, a place where she could find peace and ________.

Her children decided to fulfil her mother’s dream. They found a cottage ________ to the one in the sketch and bought it. They ________ it with the furniture and kick-knacks (小摆设) that Dickinson had treasured and turned it into a ________ to her life and her dreams.

The cottage became a place where Dickinson’s family and friends could gather and shared stories about her. It was a place where they could feel her ________ and be inspired by her firm determination. The notebook, now ________ on a small table in the cottage’s living room, remains a constant ________ of Dickinson’s dreams and aspirations. Her children hope that by keeping it there, they can honor her memory and continue to inspire others to ________ their own dreams, just as she had done.

5 . I entered this world with Poland syndrome, a disease that prevented the formation of my right arm and muscles. My parents believed playing with Lego could enhance my_______and gifted me my first kit when I was five. Initially I _______to piece the the components together but finally I crafted my first Lego work – a car. By the age of nine, I had _______my first prosthetic arm (义肢) using Lego– a simple box that perfectly accommodated my right arm.

This early creation sparked my drive for further _______. Years later, I developed another prosthetic arm called the MK-1, which had fingers, a motor, a pressure sensor, and a grabber capable of _______things. Before constructing it, I was against traditional prosthetics as they were too _______. My parents had looked into getting one years earlier, only to be discouraged by the prohibitive price. So, I concluded that I might not need one because I was managing well without.

As the years passed, my _______evolved from MK-1 to the more advanced and comfortable MK-V. One day, a couple with their eight-year-old son, who lost both_______in an accident, reached out to me after learning about my story. Short of money, they couldn’t afford well-functioning prosthetics. “Daniel,” the father_______asked, “we were wondering if you could help build a set of prosthetics for our son.”

It would be a _______task, but I responded with a “yes”. Without any delay, I _______ the task. The subsequent days witnessed how I carefully selected the Lego piece and intricately integrated practical components to enhance its dexterity(灵巧). Days _______into weeks, and the boy-customized prosthetics finally took shape. It’s time for them to fulfill their intended purpose.

I rushed to the boy’s home and _______the prosthetics onto him. They worked! The room erupted with cheers! The boy expressed his gratitude and sprinted to his parents to _______them in the biggest hug. Never had I imagined that my creations, born out of mere _______, would someday make such a difference.

6 . On Sunday, Tara VanDerveer, Stanford University’s coach, got her 1,203rd victory in a game against Oregon State University at Maples Pavilion. The _________ has helped her set an all-time record for most-wins in the history of college _________ — men’s or women’s. Celebrations had already _________ two days before, when the 70-year-old coach _________ the most-wins record.

Instead of _________ her own achievements, VanDerveer shifted the attention to the players and their _________.

“I just _________ how our teams battled,” VanDerveer told the Pac-12 Network. “It’s just a tribute (致敬) to the _________ basketball teams I’ve taught, the nice places I’ve worked and got so much _________.”

It’s VanDerveer’s latest milestone in a __________ career marked by success. During the 1995-96 season, she took leave from Stanford to __________ head coach of the women’s national team which she led to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta to __________ a gold medal with an undefeated record.

In a recent __________ with The New York Times, VanDerveer reflected how __________ women’s college basketball has gone. “When I __________ Stanford in 1985, we girls had to practice at 7:30 at night because the __________ went from 2 to 7. We just had hamburgers when we returned to our __________ at 9:30 or 10 o’clock at night. We had to __________ our own uniforms and shoes while the boys could get everything free from the school,” she said. “Just to see the __________ the girls get now: They can get equal support from the school. Such treatment is more than I ever could have __________.”

7 . As a traveler with a disability, I have always avoided cruises. This expedition-style small-ship cruise changed my mind.

When our expedition leader ________ we would make a Zodiac (卓迪船) ________ at Jan Mayen, a tiny island in the Arctic Ocean, I stepped out onto my balcony aboard our ship, ________ to find clear skies and calm seas. ________, I was met with a gust of wet wind and a view of mist-covered mountains in the distance. Jan Mayen wasn’t on our itinerary (行程), and due to its ________ location and often unpredictable weather, very few people ever ________ the island. I knew the ________ weren’t ideal, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

In fact, the possibility of ________ adventures was one of the reasons I chose this small-ship cruise. So I ________ joined my shipmates in the mud room, where we put on waterproof clothes and life jackets before hopping in the Zodiacs for a bumpy ________ to a black-sand beach. Even the fierce wind and rain couldn’t ________ our excitement as we ________ our way to the beach and hiked to a viewpoint, pausing to photograph little purple flowers ________ the volcanic rocks.

Our visit there wasn’t about what we could do or see. It was an opportunity to just be—to exist in a brief ________ on a tiny, often inaccessible, volcanic rock in the Arctic. And that’s something I never thought I’d ________ in my lifetime.

8 . He is better at words. She is better at sentences. Games they like to play involve the former, and he wins the vast majority of them the vast majority of the time. Debates they find themselves in involve the latter, and there hasn’t been an occasion (on record) of him winning one for many, many years.

Crosswords, Scrabble, that new game with green and yellow squares, he excels at. Given six tries to guess a five-letter word, he is quicker to recall words without real vowels (she doesn’t support the idea that “Y” is a vowel), and he has the nerve to guess words with triple letters, like “fluff,” on the second try. Of course, she knows what fluff is. It’s either ________ or the stuffing that comes out of cheap toys. But it’s not a word she would have guessed.

In defense of “Y” ‘s vowelness, he asks, What about “lynx”?

Lynx? she replies, incredulous. When have you ever used that aloud? Oh, look, over there, that lynx is about to pounce and ________ out my heart! She is certain that any per-son in such a scenario would use the word “bobcat.”

What most infuriates her is the presumption that she must be a whiz at words given her ________ as a writer of books. She is gifted calendar crossword puzzles (yes, three hundred and sixty-five tiny crosswords, one sheet for each day) every December, and is often dragged into long bouts of Words with Friends. In one game, he scores more than seventy points with a well-placed “Q.” She loses that game soon enough and texts him, You’re always doing stuff like that,________ the value of each word. But that’s how you play—those are the rules, he replies. She calls into question these rules: is the point system for letters really based on frequency, or is it some larger institutional ________ of mind control? He repeats, but those are the rules. On her darkest of writing days, she takes the last sentence she wrote and ________ it up for points. She is immensely disappointed. Then she stares at those cross-word calendars, and they stare back. The five she was gifted this holiday season, plus several from last year. They sit all over her desk like blind cats. Hundreds if not thousands of empty ________.

She often finds herself ________ whether her writing skills actually translate to success in games that demand lexical agility. Despite her ________ , she finds these games frustrating and ________. It’s not just about knowing words, she thinks, but about using them ________. Her brother, on the other hand, seems to ________ these nuances naturally, picking the perfect moments to drop his triple-letter bombs.

One evening, she decides to challenge him to a game of ________, determined to prove that her skills can extend beyond the page. The game starts off well for her, with each player trading clever, high-scoring words. But soon, he begins to pull ahead,________ advantage of every double word score space, while she struggles to make the most of her ________.

9 . Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary classroom walls. However, too much of a good thing may end up _______ attention and learning in young children, according to research published in Psychological Science.

Psychology researchers Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman of Carnegie Mellon University looked at whether classroom displays affected children’s ability to maintain _______ during instruction and to learn the lesson content. They found that children in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, spent more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning _______than when the decorations were removed.

“Young children spend a lot of time — usually the whole day — in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom’s _______ environment can affect how much children learn,” said Fisher, lead author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Should teachers _______ their visual displays based on the findings of this study?

“We do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all _______ problems. Furthermore,_______ research is needed to know what effect the classroom visual environment has on children’s attention and learning in real classrooms,” Fisher said. “_______, I would suggest that instead of removing all decorations, teachers should consider whether some of their visual displays do make it difficult for young children to _______.”

For the study, 24 kindergarten students were placed in ________classrooms for six introductory science lessons on topics they were unfamiliar with. Three lessons were taught in a heavily decorated classroom, and three lessons were given in a sparse (稀疏的) classroom. The results showed that while children learned in both __________ types, they learned more when the room was not heavily decorated. Specifically, children’s __________ on the test questions was higher in the sparse classroom (55% correct) than in the decorated classroom (42% correct).

“We were also interested in finding out if the visual displays were removed, whether the children’s attention would __________ to another distraction, such as talking to their peers, or the total amount of time they were distracted would remain the same,” said Godwin, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and fellow of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research.

However, when the researchers totaled all of the time children spent off-task in both types of classrooms, the rate of off-task __________ was higher in the decorated classroom (38.6% time spent off-task) than in the sparse classroom (28.4% time spent off-task).

The researchers hope these findings will lead to further studies into developing guidelines to help teachers design classrooms __________.

10 . In Favour of Simple Writing

Do you edit text messages carefully before sending them? If so, you may be the kind of person who takes pride in _______ even the simplest message. If you do not, you may see yourself as a go-getter, one who values excitement and speed over _______: get it done decently now rather than perfectly later.

People are constantly receiving messages, from the mailbox to the inbox to the text-message alert. What to read, what to skim (略读) and what to ignore are decisions that nearly everyone has to make dozens of times a day. A new book titled All Readers are Busy Nowadays makes the argument for being the careful kind of _______, even in informal lines. The authors also present well-established _______ that have long been prized in guides to writing.

Take “less is more”. Most books on writing well advocate the advice to _______ needless words. The authors, however, have _______ the idea. In an email to thousands of school-board members asking them to take a survey, cutting the count from127 to 49 words almost _______ the response rate.

Keeping messages to a _______ idea—or as few as absolutely needed—helps ensure that they will be read, remembered and acted on. _______ the number of the available options has the same effect, too. A link in an email, ________, attracted 50% more clicks when presented alone than when it was sent alongside a second additional link.

Syntax (句法) and ________ matter, too. It is more ________ to adopt short and active sentences, with common words familiar to everyone. From Facebook posts to online-travel reviews, even brief, informal pieces of writing that follow these rules get more likes and shares.

If everyone is a busy reader, everyone is a busy writer, too. That may make it tempting to sent as many messages as ________ as possible and hope for the best. But from essays to text messages organizing dinner plans, devoting time to the needs of readers has provable ________. If you are so busy that you write an undisciplined message which readers scan, ignore and delete, then you might as well have not ________ it at all.