1 . Louie, a pet parrot, saved a whole family. He ______ the sleeping Klein family in the middle of the night as flames swept through their home.

“Louie is a true ______,” Barbara Klein recently told news agency South West News Service(SWNS). “If it hadn’t been for him, I probably wouldn’t have been ______ at that time. He started shouting ‘Fire’. He had never said that word before in my ______. When I woke up, the fire was starting to spread across the living room floor.” Unluckily for the family, Louie didn’t ______. Barbara said, “He was like our babies, so it’s ______.”

Barbara took her five-year-old granddaughter ______ and ran out of the house. Her husband Larry also made it out, but was severely wounded when escaping from the burning building. “He ran to the kitchen and tried to ______ the fire out with water,” Barbara told SWNS. “After we left, he ran back into the house and insisted on ______ the pet but with no ______.” The Kleins suffered great ______ in the fire. Their house was in ______ along with its contents and the parrot Louie passed away.

“People have ______ with clothing and someone donated an apartment for three months,” Barbara said. “The man who donated the apartment also ______ us with a baby parrot. We call him Louie Jr to _____   Louie.”

2 . The disposable culture

The disposable (一次性的) culture started small. In1892 William Painter, founder of the Baltimore Bottle Seal Company, patented the bottle cap. The bottles were returned and refilled, but the bottle caps were ________. They only worked once. Painter’s chief salesman at the time was called Mr Gillette, who went on to apply the same principle to his own invention, the disposable version-cameras, contact lenses, barbecues- but the ________ has been taken a step further. For ________ reasons, most of the electrical equipment that we buy for the home is effectively disposable. This is because it is usually cheaper to ________ them than to mend them. This applies not just to radios and toasters, but also to fridges, televisions and dishwashers. We now live in a disposable culture.

Most people feel ________ this new trend. We know we should be reducing the amount of waste we produce and recycling as much as possible although despite all our efforts, landfill continues to increase. It’s hard to slip a CD player into the bottom of the rubbish these days without feeling ________ especially if you suspect that all it needs is a simple repair. But who ________ that sort of thing these days? And how much would they charge you?

With persistence, one may still ________ someone out there willing to make the necessary repairs to your broken bread-making machine, but even they will feel obliged to inform you that, given the likely price of the ________, you’ d probably be better off throwing away the old one and buying the latest model. To ________ that something should be mended even though that will cost more than a brand-new replacement is weird, to say the least.

This dilemma (困境) occasionally ________ the possibility of fixing the damaged goods yourself. If something is next to ________ anyway, why not take it apart and see if you can figure out what’s wrong? I have had particular luck with cheap, plastic, battery-operated children’s toys, where bad manufacture is usually the cause of the ________ and some strong glue or tape is usually all it needs to put it right. Small children tend to be impressed by this sort of thing, which is probably the only reason I bother. I wouldn’t suggest you attempt to repair your own microwave, although I managed it once. It was one of the most ________ experiences of my life a difficult success to mention in casual conversation, perhaps, but I’m still trying.

While some repairs are certainly beyond the ability of the ordinary consumer, many are unbelievably simple. Finding willing ________ may be almost impossible, but tracking down spare parts has never been easier now that you can look on the Internet. There are also hundreds of sites offering step-by-step instructions for making repairs.

3 . On a Sunny Saturday, Alyson Machigua, three, screamed with laughter as she and her mother, Marlen, played a game in the front yard of their home. Suddenly, tiny Alyson _______ the backyard of a neighbor. About half way across the yard, Alyson disappeared, seeming swallowed (吞没) by a hardly _______ opening in the ground, which meant the opening was not easy to find. Marlen cried loudly for help.

The neighbour Luz Jimenez, 26, was preparing dinner in her kitchen and _______ the cries were the sounds of children playing. However, when she ran outside anyway, she found Marlen _______ and dialing 911.

“Alyson fell into the hole!” Marlen cried to Luz. Then Luz heard Alyson’s cries from deep underground. Luz ran inside her own _______ and down to the basement for a gray rope to drop into the hole. Back in the yard, she used her hands to dig the hole, _______ the opening. When the policeman Aaron Perkins arrived a few minutes later, Luz was in the hole up to her _______.

“Get out of there,” Perkins told Luz, raising her up by the _______. “It’s dangerous for you.” “It’s more dangerous for the baby,” Luz said. “She’s going to _______.” After Perkins tied one end of the rope to a tree, Luz lowered ________, little by little, down the 15-foot-deep hole. Below, she saw water covering the floor of the hole. Alyson’s neck was covered. Luz dropped the remaining few feet into the water beside the baby. “Everything is going to be fine,” she told the little girl. “Don’t worry.”

As they waited for help in the two feet of dark water, Luz prayed that there were no snakes swimming at her feet. She ________ nothing more than snakes. Aboveground (在地面上), Perkins talked to Luz, keeping her ________.

Just minutes later, the Hacketts-town Fire Department and Hacketts-town Rescue Team arrived and lowered a ________ into the hole. Luz climbed up with Alyson in her arms, and then handed her over to her mother. Emergency workers rushed the baby to an ambulance, ________ her clothes to survey the injury. Alyson was scared and covered in dirt but ________, she was uninjured. Luz saved the baby’s life.

4 . A four-year-old dog named Kob became a hero in its neighborhood by discovering a possibly life-threatening gas leak (泄漏) in its owner’s front yard.

This dog’s actions not only_______its surroundings, but also stressed the importance of the behavior of our furry friends.

The story began when Kob,_______by 28-year-old Chanell Bell, started digging a large hole in the yard. At first, Bell thought this was typical dog_______, but as the hole grew larger, she became_______. Recognizing that Kob’s actions were unusual, she trusted the dog’s judgment, considering its normally well-behaved nature.

After_______a recent gas leak in her home, Chanel_______a gas detecting(探测) tool. She followed her sense and chose to use the tool to_______the newly dug hole by Kob.

Finding gas coming out of the hole, Bell_______contacted the authorities about the issue.

“If it wasn’t found, the_______would have continued to escape into our homes,” Bell said. “We were told it could have caused________health effects like breathing issues, brain damage, and even________. They told me that something as simple as________a light could have caused a burst!”

During the repairs, workers________three main gas leaks in Bell’s neighborhood caused by aging________. It took the workers over three days to repair the leaks and replace the old equipment.

Throughout the repairs, the workers________Kob for saving the neighborhood.

5 . My friend used to teach at a university with a master’s degree. In my country, for _______advancement, it is better to have a PhD. My friend went to the professor _______ scholarships, only to be told there was no _______ scholarship.

One day while driving along the road, my friend saw the professor was in a(n) _______where his car got hit from behind. My friend stopped his car and _______. He noticed the professor’s car was badly damaged. _______, both the professor and the guy were uninjured. The professor looked very _______. He attempted to _______ with the guy who insisted it was not his problem. They started arguing. My friend _______ to calm them down and offered ________. With his efforts, the guy agreed to take ________ and pay for the professor’s car damage. The professor was quite ________ with the result.

A week later, my friend received a call from the professor, and was ________ that, by chance, there was a scholarship opportunity. My friend ended up going to one of the best universities in Sweden.   

I love how my friend did this ________ and I am so grateful that the universe ________ him in a way that changed his life.

I offer to pay you $200 in one year if you give me $190 today. Good deal or bad deal? It’s the kind of math problem you might encounter in real life, _________, say, whether the cosecant (余割) of a 30-degree angle is 1 or 2. You can imagine students _________ their spirits and paying attention when they realize that they need to know algebra (代数) to avoid being cheated on a loan. Math and personal finance make a _________ fit. Students grasp concepts in math much better when they see how those subjects _________ their daily financial lives.

A survey in 2022 funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that 61 percent of parents of students said math education should be “relevant to the real world” _________ that only 21 percent said it was. The drive for relevance goes beyond K-12 education. Some of America’s top universities are _________ personal finance into their curriculums.

Harvard has a personal finance course in the _________ department that’s taught by John Campbell, a past president of the American Finance Association. “_________, personal finance was regarded as a very sort of hands-on skill that you might teach to people who were going to a technical high school,” he told me. “There is, I would say, a modern movement to _________ of personal finance as a subject with actually a lot more intellectual content.”

In most high schools, personal finance classes are light on math, and math classes are __________ in personal finance. The FiCycle curriculum has plenty of each. “The personal finance component is incredibly __________ for our high school students,” Philip Dituri, the director of education at Financial Life Cycle Education, who has a doctorate in math education, told me. He believed that quite a lot of students would be stimulated by the __________.

There is a __________ standard for personal finance education that was put together by the Council for Economic Education and the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. It emphasizes how to __________ one’s finances. FiCycle focuses more on the underlying concepts. It’s about “how and why individuals and households transfer consumption over time,” Financial Life Cycle Education says.

In conclusion, the integration of math and personal finance in education is not just an academic pursuit, but a __________ necessity for students to guide their real life. It is time for educational institutions to take note and adapt their curricula to better prepare students for the financial challenges of adulthood.

Aron Ralston will forever be known as the guy who cut his handoff to escape an accident that left him stuck between two huge rocks.

Ralston was_________in Blue John Canyon in Utah alone. As he came down a canyon, a rock became loose and_________his hand. No one knew he was there, and he only had a little bit of water and a little bit of food. It was up to him to_________himself. He decided to self-amputate (截肢) in order to save himself after_________for three days. But after two days of trying_________methods, he nearly gave up.

That is until an idea came to him on day six: he could_________apart of his own arm. After an hour of work with a cheap multitool (多刃刀具), he made a successful_________and had to get back to his vehicle, going down a 65-footwall with one hand.

He was _________discovered by a European family on a_________out, and six hours after his self-amputation, he was rescued by authorities. He was found just in time: Ralston was on the brink (边缘) of__________from blood loss. He survives today, still taking outdoor expeditions and climbing__________when not giving speeches or having movies made about his incredible __________

Born on Oct. 27, 1975, Ralston grew up in Ohio before his family__________to Colorado in 1987. After working for several years, he decided that working in a company wasn’t__________for him and quit this job to__________more time to mountaineering.