1 . Charity in Action

In a busy city like Shanghai, the hustle and bustle often overshadow the needs of those less fortunate. However, amidst this chaos, there are still stories of _________ and kindness that warm our hearts.

One such story unfolded one sunny afternoon in the heart of the city. Li Hua, a high school student, was walking home from school, _________ by the noise and crowds. Suddenly, her attention was caught by a small group of people gathered around a street corner.

Curious, she approached and saw an elderly woman sitting on the ground, _________ and alone. Her clothes were tattered, and her face showed signs of _________. Li Hua’s heart went out to her, and she knew she had to do something.

Without _________, Li Hua reached into her pocket and handed the woman all the money she had. The woman’s eyes lit up with gratitude, and a _________ smile spread across her face.

Inspired by this encounter, Li Hua decided to take action. She organized a charity event at her school, _________ awareness about the situation of the homeless and poor in the city. She _________ flyers, made posters, and even gave a speech to her classmates, urging them to contribute whatever they could.

To her surprise, the response was _________. Many students donated their pocket money, while others donated clothes and food. Even teachers and staff got involved, __________ their support.

The charity event was a huge success. Not only did it raise a significant amount of money and goods, but it also __________ a sense of community and unity among the students and staff. More importantly, it __________ the importance of helping others and the impact one individual can have on those in need.

Li Hua’s actions not only __________ the elderly woman that day but also inspired countless others to do their part in making the world a better place. Her story is a reminder that charity is not just about giving money; it’s about __________ a hand to those who need it, about showing compassion and kindness in even the smallest of ways.

In the busy and often impersonal world of Shanghai, Li Hua’s story is a beacon of hope, a reminder that amidst the noise and crowds, there is still room for __________ and compassion.

2 . In a bustling city in Arizona stood a high school where most of the students live in poverty. Among them were four sons of Mexican immigrants, Juan, Oscar, Luis, and Alfredo. These boys, coming from ________ backgrounds, often found themselves overlooked and underestimated. Bonded by fate and friendship, they shared a common passion for ________. Two science teachers there decided to enter their high school into a complicated ________ robotics competition sponsored by the NASA and the Naval Research. Excited for the news, these four boys signed up for the competition.

With enthusiasm and energy, they started calling mechanical engineers for design help. They were ________ that these kinds of robots require glass syntactic flotation foam, a type of floating material used in various marine applications.________ money, all they could afford was some PVC pipes and duct tape (强力胶布).________, they searched the city for various spare parts, gathering whatever they could to bring their vision to life. With the teachers’ guidance and encouragement, they ________ together a robot with no more than metal and wires.

As they worked on their robot, the boys also faced personal challenges. Juan struggled with the weight of family responsibilities; Oscar ________ a deep-seated fear of failure; Luis’s heart ached from the constant peers’ mockery (嘲笑) for his ________ accent, and Alfredo longed for acceptance and belonging.________ these obstacles, they persevered, leaning on each other for support and inspiration.

After a few test runs of their robot, they piled into a second-hand van to head to the competition. Upon entering the main pool area, they noticed the college teams wearing matching outfits, with robots sponsored by big companies. Feeling a bit nervous, the boys put the robot in the water for a test run.________, the PVC didn’t hold up, causing the robot to leak and sink.

However, instead of letting this ________ ruin their spirits, the boys put their heads together and came up with a brilliant solution. 12 hours later, armed with 8 super-absorbent pads to plug the leak, the robot was ________ into the pool again. This time, their robot performed admirably. Gliding gracefully through the waters, it navigated the course with precision and speed,________ the judges and audience alike. This underwater robot, a symbol of their determination and ________, conquered the waters, defeated engineering powerhouse MIT and ranked first in the country. This was not just a win for those four but a victory for every underdog with a dream.

3 . It started with a bit of casual discomfort on the head, but after a week it had spread to the back of my neck, enough to lead me to my laptop. Annoying as it was, I was ________ to take up my doctor’s time with such a silly complaint and then have a wasted journey only to be informed that it would clear up by itself and that ________ would be of no use at all.

As soon as I’d tapped in ‘online self-diagnosis’, the search engine provided me with over 11.5 million results. And during the time normally spent in the clinic’s waiting room reading the Women’s Weekly, I was able to find a site that would provide a free ________ in the comfort of my chair, and with no need for an appointment,

I answered all the questions until I eventually reached a description exactly matching my ________. As I clicked on ‘More Information’, I was hit with what I’d never anticipated. The worst case scenario was complete hair loss. I couldn’t have been more ________.

I headed off to the doctor for what I thought would be a blood test but which turned out to be a valuable lesson in not ________ everything you read on the internet. It took him less than a minute to guess at and locate head lice (虱子). I was relieved to know that I would be ________ my hair, and horrified to know that it was being occupied.

I learnt my lesson, but for some the worry caused by ________ every ache has led to a new form of hypochondria (疑病症). Named ‘cyberchondria’ by the print media back in 2000, this particular condition has ________ greatly. Although most people’s main point of call is still the doctor’s surgery, it’s estimated that ________ worries are now the second most researched topic on the web. This is truly a serious concern when about 25%of the medical information online is thought to be ________.

Once upon a time, hypochondria required time and effort: you had to go to the library to research your diseases and ________ go through the books. Now it’s just a matter of a few clicks of a mouse. But while your doctor will make a diagnosis ________ your age, appearance and medical history, a search engine will rely simply on algorithms (算法). These come up with results graded according to popularity or numbers of key words. So the most highly ranked hits might actually be for very genuine disease, which are nonetheless extremely ________. One minute you think you’ve come down with the flu, the next you’re under attack from sub-tropical, flesh-eating bacteria. Time spent going to the doctor’s for ________ of mind suddenly seems fair enough.

4 . AN UNLIKELY HERO

Miep Gies was a recently married young office worker living in Amsterdam in 1942. As German occupiers tightened their grip on the city, Gies’s boss, Otto Frank, asked her to hide him and his family from the Nazis, who were sending Jews to concentration camps. For the next two years, Gies ________ her life daily to smuggle food to the Franks and four others concealed in secret rooms above Otto’s business.

When she could no longer protect the family-when the Nazis finally came and took them away in 1944—Gies kept their story alive by saving Anne Frank’s ________. She’s the reason the world has The Diary of a Young Girl.

Later in Gies’s life, people called her heroic. Believing she simply did what she could in evil times, she is said to have made this ________: “Even an ordinary secretary or a housewife or a teenager can, within their own small ways, turn on a small light in a dark room.”

A Small Light tells Gies’s story in an eight-part mini-series shot in Amsterdam and Prague. In interviews on location, its creators and actors ________ on why Gies remains an inspiration.

“________ most of us are familiar with the diary, what was going on outside the annex...is the mystery,” says Tony Phelan, who with wife Joan Rater headed the project. Rater adds to that idea: “What does hiding people mean on a day-to-day ________? Miep said yes to Otto Frank, and then you have to say yes every day afterwards, even when it’s hard, even when you’re sick, even when you don’t want to. And that, to me the everyday drudgery of it all, is quite dramatic.”

Phelan and Rater, married for 30 years, created, executive produced, and wrote the miniseries after six years of research. It was a 1995 ________, Anne Frank Remembered, that initially ________ their interest, and they visited the Anne Frank House, the museum established where the Franks once hid. After descending its ________, narrow stairs—as Ann had—Rater noticed a girl doing cartwheels(侧手翻) outside.

For A Small Light, Rater turned that memory of a girl’s carefree spirit into a flashback scene: Anne in 1941, on Miep and Jan Gies’s wedding day. She’s skipping, excited over the romantic ceremony. Then within a year, her life would be ________ but fear.

One bright spot for Anne was visits from Gies, who ________ supplies by bicycle. Actress Bel Powley plays Gies and, to get into her character’s mindset, retraced those journeys. “Tony and Joan gave me all these cool maps so that I could cycle Miep’s ________,” she says. Powley, who is Jewish, felt the ________ of telling this story, especially as the shoot neared its end.

The girl who wanted to be a famous writer became one, of course. Still, no one would ever read________ that began “Dear Kitty” had Gies not gathered the scattered papers and the diary with the red-checkered cover and later given them to Otto, the family’s sole survivor. The Miep Gieses of the world—the small lights, the extraordinary ordinary people who did something, who pushed back against tyranny, who pushed back against authoritarians, who pushed back against fascists—remembering what they accomplished, I think, gives us some ________ on what we can accomplish.”

5 . I forgot to pay my property tax last year. Was it a sign of early onset dementia(痴呆)? Had I spent last September as an anti-government tax resister and the entire month of September had ________ my mind? Then I realized the real problem: I have notification ________.

Since 2020, many of us have lived ________ online, relying on a trillion apps to send helpful, pinging notifications. So many notifications that they’ve become a waterfall of sound I no longer hear. I’ve grown ________ of every notification. I live in a continuous state of “oops.”

My bad decisions and my ________ are to blame. My first error was inviting these pings and beeps into my life decades ago. As someone with a memory as reliable as an inattentive goldfish’s, I once depended on a detailed paper calendar and to-do list system to keep me on ________. My careful notes worked for years. But I was eventually ________ transferring all the birthdays from one year’s calendar to the next. The coming of the PalmPilot (掌上电脑) thrilled me: I could enter the info once and, five days before each loved one’s birthday, the device would automatically inform me of the coming date.

That little PalmPilot was a gateway drug. I eventually ________ my brain to more powerful devices. And for years, generally they were at a ________ level. Then the pandemic hit and my notification stream became a series of alerts and even alerts for other unimaginable demands of alertness.

Then the other factor ________ kicked in. My actual hearing loss, a genetic gift from my father’s side, started getting worse, turning the world into a series of dull noises. Even with my hearing aids in, maybe I didn’t hear a notification.

Having become deaf to alerts both ________ and metaphorically, I reasoned that enduring a little wrist vibration with every notification would bring me back into being a responsible adult. ________, I felt like I had severe nerve damage. After month 13 of the pandemic, my general stress level was peaking and I was too ________ to turn some off.

“You’re not the boss of me!” I yelled one afternoon when seven notifications popped up ________. I turned away like a bad-tempered teen. The solution? I’m turning off all notifications and moving my life back to ________. Yes, it will be a tough adjustment. But it will force me to grab responsibility for my daily life back from all the devices.

The good news: Paper doesn’t chirp, buzz, flash or “pop up.” Paper just waits, quietly, non-judgmentally and trust you.

6 . So many of us are terrible at being terrible. As our children venture off to school, sports, dances and music lessons, we urge them: Just try something, keep practicing, you’re only a beginner. And yet, faced with our own failure, we become less confident, and quit altogether.

Images of perfection fill our social-media feeds, along with advertisements assuring us we wouldn’t be so _______ if we just bought this thing or tried that product. Parents often add to the pressure, _______ their kids will end up sliding down the socioeconomic ladder.

What if we’re _______?

“It’s such a _______ not to have to be good,” says Karen Rinaldi, who refers to herself as a horrible surfer. After 20 years on the board, she is still bad, and she loves it. There is the excitement of being out on the water, but there is also the _______ of not having to be the expert, the freedom to _______ help and rely on others in a way she never would at work. Back on land, she says she is more understanding and _______others’ mistakes. “The benefit of not _______ myself every day,” she says, “is that I get to surf every time I want.”

Ms. Rinaldi, whose experience led to a book about what you can learn from failure, recommends asking yourself: “What is it that you’ve always wanted to do or try but were too _______?” Whatever it is, she says, start doing it. Should you struggle, ________ the fact that you’re a beginner. “Go in there with the ________ to say, ‘I’m new,’” she says. “People want to help you learn. It makes them feel good.”

Take myself as another example. I started yoga lessons this summer. When I ________ Syd Schulz, a professional mountain biker, that I was terrible at the poses, her response was “what did you expect?” “It’s a little ________ to people who have spent years and years of their lives acquiring skills to think that you should have those overnight,” says Ms. Schulz. Years spent working on her cycling have taught her that improvement often comes in ________ steps, following long stretches of inactivity or even getting ________.

7 . Bruno went into the kitchen and got the biggest surprise of his life. He could barely believe his eyes. “Shmuel!” he said. “What are you doing here in my kitchen?”

Shmuel looked up and his terrified face ______ a broad smile when he saw his friend standing there. “Bruno!” he said. “They asked me to polish the glasses. They said they needed someone with tiny ______.”

He held his hand out and Bruno noticed it was like the hand of the pretend skeleton. In reply, Bruno held his own hand out so that the tips of their middle fingers were almost touching. Bruno’s hand appeared ______ and full of life. The veins weren’t visible through the skin, the fingers weren’t little more than dying twigs. Shmuel’s hand, however, told a very ______ story.

“Shmuel! Here!” said Bruno, stepping forward and putting some slices of chicken in his friend’s hand. “Just eat them.” The boy stared at the food in his hand for a moment and looked up at Bruno with ______ but terrified eyes. He threw a ______ in the direction of the door and then thrust all the slices into his mouth ______ and gobbled them down in twenty seconds. “Thank you, Bruno.” said Shmuel, giving a faint smile.

Bruno smiled back and was about to offer him more food, but just at that moment Lieutenant Kotler reappeared. Bruno stared at him, feeling the ______ grow heavy, sensing Shmuel’s shoulders sinking down.

______ Bruno, Lieutenant Kotler marched over to Shmuel and glared at him. Shmuel looked up at Lieutenant Kotler, who frowned, ______ forward slightly and tilting his head as he examined the boy’s face. “You have been eating,” said Lieutenant Kotler. “Did you steal something from that fridge?” Shmuel looked toward Bruno, his eyes ______ for help.

“Answer me!” shouted Lieutenant Kotler.

“No, sir. He gave it to me,” said Shmuel, tears welling up in his eyes as he threw a sideways glance at Bruno. “He’s my friend,” he added.

“Do you know this boy, Bruno?” he asked in a loud voice.

Bruno’s mouth ______ open and he tried to remember the way you used your mouth if you wanted to say the word “yes”. He’d never seen anyone look so terrified as Shmuel did at that moment and he wanted to say the right thing to make things better, but then he realized that he couldn’t because he was feeling just as ______ himself.

“Tell me, Bruno!” shouted Kotler, his face growing red. “I won’t ask you a third time.”

“I’ve never seen him before in my life.” said Bruno immediately, “I don’t know him.”

Hearing that, Shmuel wasn’t crying any more, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to ______ his soul not to live inside tiny body any more, but to ______ away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was far away.

8 . On the mantelpiece is a sign saying “A home is not a home without a dog”. Next to it, in the couple’s living room, is a framed picture of a dog, which is itself nestled among ________ dog decorations. The kitchen, where Laura Jacques and Richard Remde’s four dogs ________ play and rest, is similarly decorated. Upstairs is the couple’s super king size bed, roomy enough to ________ two humans and four dogs.

Visitors to this house in Silsden, West Yorkshire are left in no doubt about the ________ of dogs in the couple’s lives. Their four dogs will soon become six, when they bring home two more cloned dogs.

Jacques works as a dog-walker. She has studied dog ________ and has spent a lot of time volunteering at the Dogs Trust. The couple have just moved into a new house, one they bought because it has a lot of land for the dogs to run around in. One corner has been ________ as a pet graveyard. Dylan, their eight-year-old dog who died earlier this year is to take the first ________.

When Jacques received the news from the vet that Dylan had died, she ________ in shock and grief. “I couldn’t comprehend that the worst possible thing had happened. I was just in total shock,” she says. “And then an idea occurred to me – I want to clone Dylan.”

The couple say they know how ________ pet cloning is and that some will criticize them for “playing God”. But they ________ that they are doing nothing wrong. “We have helped to make a scientific ________,” says Jacques. “Arguably dog breeders are doing something ________ but they are doing it for money while we aren’t. I can understand the ________ around human cloning – creating beings that don’t have a real mum or dad – but the same thing doesn’t apply to dogs. I know that some people will disagree with what we’ve done but I hope they won’t ________ us.”

They accept that some people will say they are mad and wonder why they are spending $100,000 on the ________. “We are not mad,” says Remde, “We are dog-mad though, and we both absolutely love all animals.”

9 . I'm an attorney（代理人）, a children's book author, an entrepreneur（企业家）, and a regular volunteer at my church. Having moved to California from New York recently, I often wake up to thousands of_________and emails. Like many of you, I'm a busy person and always on the go.

I started a storytelling_________called the Auditory Museum. We believe in the power of shared experiences. As part of our mission, we are_________to using personal stories as a means for social change. One day, I flew back to the east coast for a friend's wedding. After it, I had a few hours to kill before my red-eye flight back home. Like any other entrepreneurs, I decided to sit in the hotel lobby at_________with my laptop and get some work done.

While writing an email about the importance of storytelling, I was_________by a gentleman who was curious as to what I was working on._________that I had lost my train of thought, I gave him a fake smile._________with my icy response to him the gentleman_________next to me in the hotel lobby. "Why are you working now? What do you do? Where are you from? "Now, at this point, the irony was not lost on me. I was so_________my task that I had prioritized __________a non-pressing email over the opportunity to engage in conversation.

I closed my laptop and smiled. I told the gentleman about my job, my company, my passion for storytelling, and my __________to create social change through the sharing of personal experiences. He began to tell me his life story. One hour later, he thanked me for my time, wished me good luck and__________.

That night I learned a very__________lesson. We live in a generation obsessed with self-improvement, self-help, self__________etc. I don't think there is anything wrong with focusing on ourselves. In fact, it is arguably necessary for personal growth. However, we can often find the answer to life's greatest problems outside of ourselves, in human __________.

10 . My life as a tax-paying employed person began in middle school, when, for three whole days, I worked in a baking factory.

My best friend Betsy’s father was a manager at Hough Bakeries, which, at Easter time, _________ little bunny (兔子) cakes for all its _________throughout Cleveland. It happened that the plant downtown needed eight kids for _________ help during our spring break, for which I had no_________ beyond listening to my favorite records. I’d _________ minimum wage. I’d see how a factory_________. My parents thought all of this was a grand idea and called Betsy’s dad with their _________.

Our_________in the factory were simple: Place cakes on a moving belt. Attach icing (糖霜) ears. Apply icing eyes and nose._________ bunny from the belt. This was ____________ than it sounds.____________ a bit and the cakes pile up. As I told my parents at dinner that first night, it was all a little more high-pressure than I’d   ____________ .

Dad __________. The son of a grocer, he’d spent the summers of his childhood____________ food in Benardsville, New Jersey. This was the sort of work that made you____________ the dollars you earned and respect those who did the work, he told me.