1 . One of the most inspiring quotes(名言) I ever heard was by Brian Tracy. He said: “The_________between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people_________many more times than unsuccessful people.”

I deeply understood the _________ of the quote soon after my first book was published.

I was living in Atlanta at the time and ___________ my first signing sale for my new book at the phoenix and Dragon, the largest bookstore in the city. Although a nice sign was placed outside the room ___________ images of both me and my book, The 9 Insights of the Wealthy Soul, not a single customer entered the room. _________ each minute passed, I became increasingly _________.

At 6:25 pm, just before the store’s _________, I began to get myself ready to leave. At that moment, just when I couldn’t fell any _________, a middle-aged couple walked into the room. I managed to ____________ my emotions and introduced myself and my book.

The couple turned the pages each other, and the husband ____________ to his wife. She then told me, “I think we’ll get the book.”

Despite the impulse (冲动) to jump ____________, and hold their hands to thank them for being my __________ readers, I realized the woman was trying to say something else.

“The __________ we’re buying it is that our son died two years ago,” she said. “Maybe your book will help us ____________ it .”

At that moment, I knew if I never sold a copy of the book, my four years of __________ had been meaningless.

Although I would have many more challenging years ____________ my book became a bestseller, this couple’s story was all the __________ I needed at that point to keep me __________.

Thanks to them, I would realize that the greatest of lives are made all in the same way : One challenge ... one challenge ... one difficulty ... one step ... and one small ____________ at a time.

3 . There are times when people are so tired that they fall asleep almost anywhere. We can see there is a lot of sleeping on the bus or train on the ______ home from work in the evenings. A man will be reading the newspaper, and seconds later it ______ as if he is trying to ______ it. Or he will fall asleep on the shoulder of the stranger ______ next to him. Another place where unplanned short sleep ______ is in the lecture hall where a student will start snoring(打鼾) so ______ that the professor has to ask another student to ______ the sleeper awake. A more embarrassing situation occurs when a student starts falling into sleep and the weight of the head pushes the arm off the ______, and the movement carries the ______ of the body along. The student wakes up on the floor with no memory of getting there. The worst time to fall asleep is when ______. Police reports are full of ______ that occur when people fall into sleep and go off the road. If the drivers are ______, they will not be seriously hurt.One woman’s car,______, went into the river. She woke up in four feet of ______ and thought it was raining. When people are really ______, nothing will stop them from falling asleep—no matter where they are.

4 . Lise Meitner was born in Vienna, Austria on November 7, 1878. She was the third child of eight children in the family. Her father Philipp, who was a lawyer, hired personal teachers to teach the children, and she learned mathematics very well. Music was important to the family, and all the children learned to play the piano. The Meitner children were taught to listen to their parents, but to think for themselves.

When Lise Meitner finished school at the age of 14, she could not go to college for higher education, as were all girls in Austria. But, inspired by the discovery of Henri Becquerel, she was determined to study radioactivity (放射性).

When she turned 21, women were finally allowed into Austrian universities. Meitner was admitted into the University of Vienna; there she was excellent at math and physics and earned her doctor’s degree in 1906. She wrote to Marie Curie, but there was no room for her in the Paris lab, so Meitner made her way to Berlin. There she worked with Otto Hahn, but as an Austrian Jewish woman, she was excluded from the main labs and allowed to work only in the basement.

In 1912, the pair moved to a new university and Meitner had better lab equipment. Though Meitner was forced to escape Nazi Germany in 1938, they continued to co­work. Meitner continued her work in Sweden and later they found the phenomenon “nuclear fission (核裂变)”. The discovery, which finally led to the atomic bomb, won Hahn the Nobel Prize in 1944. Meitner, ignored by the Nobel committee (委员会), refused to return to Germany after the war and continued her atomic research in Stockholm into her 80s.

6 . It’s 2035. You have a job, a family and you’re about 40 years old! Welcome to your future life.

Getting ready for work, you pause in front of the   mirror. “Turn red,” you say. Your shirt changes from   sky blue to deep red.Tiny preprogrammed electronics   (智能电子元件) are rearranged in your shirt to change its color. Looking into the mirror, you find it hard to believe you’re 40. You look much younger. With amazing advances in medicine, people in your generation may live   to be 150 years old. You’re not even middle­aged!

As you go into the kitchen and prepare to pour your breakfast cereal into a bowl, you hear, “To lose weight, you shouldn’t eat that!” from your shoes. They read the tiny electronic code(电子源码) on the cereal box to find out the nutrition details. You decide to listen to your shoes. “Kitchen, what can I have for breakfast?”A list of possible foods appears on the counter as the kitchen checks its food supplies.

“Ready for your trip to space?” you ask your son and daughter. In 2015 only specially trained astronauts went into space—and very few of them. Today anyone can go to space for day trips or longer vacations. Your best friend even works in space. Handing your children three strawberries each, you add, “The doctor says you need   these   for   space   travel.” Thanks to medical advances, vaccination shots (防疫针) are a thing of the past. Ordinary foods contain special vaccines. With the strawberries in their mouths, the kids head for the front door.

It’s time for you to go to work. Your car checks your fingerprints and unlocks the doors. “My office. Autopilot,”you command. Your car drives itself down the road and moves smoothly into traffic on the highway. You sit back and unroll your e­newspaper. The latest news downloads and fills the viewer. Looking through the pages, you watch the news as video film rather than read it.

Since China’s TV series Nirvana in Fire was on show in Argentina, the viewers there have been excited about the story.

    1    (base) on a historical novel of the same name, it tells the tale of a young man who sets out to fight for     2    (he) family’s honor in sixth-century China.

It is the first time that Argentina     3    (show) a program that is “so different” from the common content of the network, and it has been so well-received by     4     public. Nirvana in Fire has got hundreds     5     comments (评论) on social networks, not only from members of the Chinese community,     6     from many Argentineans. The series offers a window into Chinese customs, lifestyles and ways of thinking.

Angie Behrmann, an Argentine painter     7     specializes (专门从事) in Chinese calligraphy (书法), said she watched the series     8    (practice) her Chinese, but was attracted by the story and the way it was told. “The story is    9    (real) well-written. Everything that takes place is so exciting,” she said. The painter added she has learned more about Chinese culture and got to know different    10    (place) in China thanks to the series.

9 . A crew（全体成员）of six teenage girls completed a nine-day sailing trip in the US recently, after having seasickness and strong winds.

For the past three years, the Sea Cadet teenagers who set sail were all male. Roger Noakes, who captained（担任队长）the boat, said this was the first time he’d taken out an all-female crew.

The girls asked for an all-girls trip in August this year. The crew set sail along with three adults, Noakes and two Sea Cadet representatives. The original plan was for the girls to sail 24 hours a day in rotating shifts（轮流换班）along the coast and then return. Things turned out differently, however. “The first night was difficult because the wind was really hard. The waves were going up and down,” said Abby Fairchild,16. “Everybody got seasick.” Noakes gave the girls the choice of just sailing in the bay and not going into open water. “But they decided they were going.”

The teenagers then sailed a long way overnight and slept in shifts. “We’ve learned everything from controlling the boat to putting up the sails while we have rough seas,” said 15-year-old Olivia Wilcox.

The teenagers stopped on land in Massachusetts. They didn’t make it to their original destination（目的地） in Maine, where they were supposed to have a celebratory dinner, due to the weather and winds. They said they weren’t disappointed, however, as they’d learned a lot. “They learned about boating, and above all, they built confidence and character,” said Noakes.

10 . If you’ve ever travelled with other people, the chances are you’ve had to make compromises. When you want to get up early to watch the sunrise, for example, your friends may argue that getting enough sleep is more important. And when you want to try the different food, your friends might say it looks strange and push you to a Chinese restaurant instead.

This is probably why more people these days are choosing to travel alone. According to reports on holiday habits from the Association of British Travel Agents, the percentage of people in the UK who take trips alone has been increasing, from 6 percent in 2011, to 12 percent in 2017, and to 15 percent in 2018. Most of these people said they choose to travel alone because this allows them to “do what they want”.

In fact, travelling alone is only a part of a recent trend (趋势) of people wanting to take more time alone—or what’s called “me time”. “Imagine yourself as a full pot of water and everything else that asks for your attention is an empty glass. When you provide what is needed for them you are using up your own water supply,” Editor Nicole Lyons wrote for the mental health social network Psych Central. “But how are you refilling your pot? This is where your ‘me time’ comes in.”

However, it’s still quite a common belief that those who do things alone are losers and that they’re alone simply because they don’t have anybody to be with. But why can’t people just be enough for themselves?

The now Duchess of Sussex Rachel Meghan Markle once wrote on her blog in 2016 about how she enjoyed taking herself out to dinner and travelling alone. “It’s not easy. But it’s important,” she wrote. You should face everything and encourage yourself to move forward when the feeling of loneliness and boredom sweeps through your body and mind, according to Markle.