1 . Every evening, my journey begins with a one-stop hop from Victoria Station to Clapham Junction, where I catch the main ___________ home. One evening, I was standing in the crowd when I noticed the rows of ___________ seats in First Class, and a ___________ thought occurred to me. In all my time commuting, I had never seen the ___________ come around. Why didn’t I just ___________ it? I slipped into First Class.

The atmosphere was nice and the seats were ___________. The doors opened and a woman entered the carriage on crutches (拐杖). She settled herself in one of the seats. I should have known what would happen next. “Tickets, please.”

There was ___________ to run. In my haste I had taken a seat by the door, and I was the _________ passenger the inspector turned to. I had no choice but to ___________ my rail pass.

“That’s not a first class ticket,” he said.

My ____________ went blank. Before I could answer, the woman with the bad leg cut in.

“I was told I could sit in First Class,” she said ____________.

The man ____________ and gazed at her.

“Then whoever the person was, he gave you the bad advice,” said the inspector.

While their ____________ went on, I grabbed my bag and slipped out of the carriage into the Standard Class. I pushed into the crowd, then, using a ____________ I had picked up from a spy film, removed my coat to disguise my appearance. When I ____________ at Clapham Junction, the poor woman with the bad leg was on the edge of tears.

2 . School buses are familiar to most people. However, Sam Balto, an elementary school teacher, creates a brand-new ______ of school buses in Portland, Oreg. ______ loading kids into the yellow vehicles, he involves them in a school “bike bus”. The bike bus ______ differently from the way school buses do. There’re two meetup locations for kids. After the two groups ______, the children cycle to school together.

Though popular in some areas, bike buses are still ______ in the U.S. Balto’s idea for that began as an initiative for Earth Day, which surprisingly became a ______, with most students in Balto’s school participating. Then he decided to ______ . Now ______ the bike bus in action. “Kids ______ the ride. Parents notice on bike bus mornings, kids get up and out of home ______. They’ re eager to be with friends,” said Balto. Actually, its ______    go beyond promoting socializing. The physical activity helps ______ kids’ strength and it’s also climate action.

Right now, Balto feels it’s ______ to offer the bike bus once a week and he’s relying on volunteers and seeking official ______. “It can be a daily way to transport kids if cities or schools pay adults to lead it,” Balto explained. If possible, he encourages other Portland schools to ______ them. “More kids across the city should have such pleasant experiences.”

3 . Colorado traffic police department has come up with a unique effort to ensure the driving safety of motorbike riders in Denver. Through a(n) _________ partnership with “Advance Auto Parts”, Denver police is _________ the motorists, who might not be _________ to spend money in repairing their damaged vehicle parts.

Advanced Auto Parts store has _________ the Denver Police Department with 100 cards each worth $25 for handing out to the pulled-over motor drivers. Driving with a broken or damaged vehicle part is _________ a traffic rule violation and motorists are often pulled over by cops due to this very _________. Then they are either given a warning or a _________ to pay a fine. But from now on, the Denver police will have the option to give a $25 gift card _________, if they pull over any motorist for a defective headlight, bad taillight, or any other broken _________. This money will help them in fixing the damaged part and back on the road with further __________.

According to Paul Pazen, the Denver Police Chief, this Advanced Auto Parts’ __________ has helped the police department in getting __________ submission with the motorists and also __________ social relationships with the community. The officers have already __________ a few cards and have enjoyed the sigh of __________ and smiles on the pulled-over drivers’ faces.

4 . We arrived in Spain for the first time a few weeks ago. I decided to _________ a car because we had sold the one we had in England before _________ home. Yesterday the sales office rang us to say the car was ready. I had tried out a model like it before, but as I was not yet _________ driving in this city, my wife did not want me to collect it _________ so we went together to fetch it. We paid for the car and _________ the papers. They told us that there was enough petrol(汽油) to take us to a garage, where we could fill up. The _________ garage to the office was about 100 yards away and we got there _________. But when I turned into the main road I suddenly saw a lot of cars racing _________ me. I got out of _________ as fast as I could by backing into the garage __________ and the man behind shouted at me.

“It’s such a problem to __________ to drive on the right side, isn’t it?” my wife said. “Yes, if only I had had a few lessons for practice,” I replied. “You had better go __________ on the way home,” my wife said. “You’d be sorry if you had __________ on the first day, wouldn’t you?” While we were talking, the man behind got out of his car and said in good English, “Would you mind telling me __________ you are thinking of leaving? __________ are you going to sit in your car all day?”

5 . Why HS2 should go ahead

For the country that invented railways, Britain has shown remarkably little interest in them lately. New networks have been built around Europe in the past few decades, but the only significant stretch of ________ laid in Britain in a century is the 67-mile HS1 railway that links London to the Channel Tunnel. ________ , the country has half as much track as it had in 1963.Yet while Britain has an almost American ________ to invest in railways, its commuting(通勤) patterns are European: l0% of journeys are by rail, compared with 9% in Germany and less than 1% in America.

Britain's big ________ is that, because it has built no new high-speed lines, it runs fast intercity trains on the same track as slow commuter ones. Long ________ have to be left between slow and express trains. The need to make way for high-speed trains thus ________ the number of commuter services,and vice versa. Eight years ago,the government decided to change this by building a new 345-mile railway from London to the north of England. Though branded as High Speed 2, its principal job was to improve capacity(运输量) rather than ________ .

Rail is an increasingly significant part of the transport mix. Climate change is making carbon-efficiency even more important. At the same time, passenger numbers have gone beyond ________ . The government had expected passenger volumes to increase by 17-21% in the decade from 2011; actually, they were up by 24% within just seven years and are expected to go on ________ at a similar rate.

The benefit-to-cost ratio(效益成本比率) calculated for HS2, at around one, is hardly acknowledged. But just as the costs of big transport projects are often ________ , so are their long-term benefits. The extension to London's Jubilee tube line, ________ ,was approved with a BCR of less than one, but recent analysis suggests that it has been more like 1.75. And that includes only the profits that go directly to the railway, not the ________ consequences of the recovery of London's Docklands area, which the tube line made possible.

The main point of HS2, similarly, is its impact on the cities and towns along its ________ and beyond. Boris Johnson, the prime minister, is on a mission to promote growth in northern and western areas ________ by the country's London-centered pattern of growth. On its own HS2 won't make that happen, but doing so without a new railway would be ________ . The success of the "Northern Powerhouse" rail scheme, to link the north's big towns, depends on it.

6 . Commuting has long been a problem for urban residents worldwide, especially for those living and working in big cities _______ Beijing, Shanghai, New York City and Tokyo. For commuters, _______ subways and traffic jams during rush hours are nothing short of a nightmare.

Forty years ago when I came to Beijing to work for China Daily, people had the same _______ as they have today, but for different reasons. _______ Beijing had just one subway line, Line One, which _______ a little more than 20 kilometers. And since it was the only subway in China, I was told that it was built more as an air raid shelter than a _______ of public transport.

On the ground, _______ were few and narrow but had little traffic, for there were no _______ cars in China four decades ago. Apart from buses and a few government cars, horse-pulled carriages that transported daily necessities also _______ the roads. And when a bus ________ came, it was more likely than not to be already ________, and one had to struggle to ________ it.

________, most people commuted by bicycles earning China the ________ of a "country of bikes". Each day, I pedaled for hours, commuting between dorm and office, ________ news conferences and interviewing people for the ________.

When I traveled on the subways of New York City, Tokyo and West Berlin in the 1980s, I was ________ by their spider-web-like network and ________ that China would one day have as fast, reliable and convenient a subway system.

Chinese cities, ________, have even better subway systems today. 40 Chinese cities have subways with more than 6,000 km of tracks while about a similar number of cities are building new ones. The subway today is the ________ mode of public transport in Beijing with nearly 10 million commuters using it on any working day.

7 . Private jets receive ridiculous tax relief that hurt the environment

The blue jeans and T-shirts of the global elite are no more comfortable than those worn by the middle class. They drink the same coffee and carry the same smartphones. But a(n) ________ is growing between the rich and the rest when they fly. Ordinary folk ________ sleeplessly into cheap seats. The elite stretch out Hat, taking naps. This would be no one else’s business but for two things. First, private jets are horribly polluting. Second, they are often and ________ subsidized (补贴).

Private airlines were ________ hard by the global financial crisis, when both companies and individuals sought to reduce expenses. But now private jets are booming again, partly because new booking services and shared-ownership schemes are cutting the cost of going private and ________ busy executives away from first— and business-class seats on regular flights. But the boom is also a result of tax relief, which is even more ________ than those offered to ordinary airlines. America’s rules are ________ still. Its tax reform allowed individuals and companies to avoid paying 100% of the costs of a new or used private jet against their federal taxes, creating extraordinarily cheap jet purchases.

Flying on a private jet can help ________ on time for those whose time is extraordinarily valuable. Since companies can avoid paying their corporate-tax bills by presenting how much these flights cost them, in some countries the use of a private jet is a tax-free ________ for executives. But a growing volume of research suggests that flying them ________ is often a waste of money for shareholders. The jets are often used to fly to places where corporate seniors are more likely to have holiday homes than business meetings. ________, users of such planes are more likely to commit deception: a careless attitude to other people’s money sometimes shades into complete criminality. The environmental effects of corporate jets are awful. The emissions for new supersonic business jets under development will be many times higher. Amazingly, these emissions are largely ________. Airlines are not covered by the Paris agreement to limit climate change, and most private jets are ________ from CORSIA, a carbon-offsetting (碳补偿) scheme involving most airlines.

All air travel is bad for the environment. The tax breaks for cooking the planet in this way cannot be ________. They should all be abandoned. Carbon emissions should be ________, not subsidised by the sleepless masses and the even less fortunate souls who never fly.

10 . Anyone who has ever travelled on airplanes knows how annoying delays (延误) are. Not only do they _________ us from getting where we need to be _________, they are also really boring. That’s why some Southwest Airlines employees tried to _________ their passengers when they were hit with a two-hour delay by holding a(n) _________ driver’s license photo contest (比赛)!

Kristen, a passenger, was _________ at first when her flight was delayed for several hours. However, her anger _________ when the gate agent announced the start of a(n) _________ game called “Win a prize for the worst driver’s license picture”.

“My flight to Washington, D.C. had been delayed for almost two and a half hours and I was getting heated until this gate agent _________ playing games with everyone waiting to pass the time, after which I started thinking I’ll be willing to _________ here all night if you keep this up,” Kristen wrote in her post, adding the game was ____________.

Kristen, who was ____________ to Washington, D.C. from Orlando to visit friends, praised Southwest Airlines in her post, and someone from the company quickly ____________.

“I’m glad our agent was able to make the delay a little more ____________ for you all, Kristen! We ____________ to have you on your way as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said, adding when Kristen asked the company to ____________ the prize to the Orlando-based team, “send over your confirmation, and I’ll be sure they get the recognition they deserve!”

When Kristen later described her ____________ to reporters, she said ____________ for the worst photos included Southwest products and $25 vouchers (代金券) toward future flights.

“I was really annoyed that the flight kept getting delayed,” Kristen said. “Once he started playing games, I was ____________ and having a great time and didn’t even ____________ that the flight was delayed.”

No wonder so many people ____________ Southwest!