The race to the South Pole is a famous story. Captain Scott and a Norwegian     1     called Ronald Amundsen both wanted to get there first. They both prepared for many months, but in the end their    2     for reaching the pole were very different：Amundsen used dogs to    3     his sleds and Scott used motorized sleds and horses. Amundsen had good weather during his     4    , but Scott had bad weather. When Scott’s team     5     from the hut on 1 November 1911, there were     6     snowstorms and the sleds broke     7    . After a few weeks, the horse died and most of his team turned back. In the end, only five men     8    on to the South Pole: Scott, Oates, Evans, Bowers and Wilson.

On 17 January 1912, Scott’s team reached the Pole and came     9     the Norwegian flag——Amundsen’s team were there before them and were already racing back to tell the world. Tired and     10    , Scott’s team made their way back home, but they     11     food and got lost in snowstorms; they did not     12     it.

In Scott’s Hut, there is still    13     old explorer’s boots. Scott wore these boots for years and they are dirty and broken, but they’re very special too. They tell us Scott’s story--that he was hard-working, ambitious and     14    , and that he pushed himself to the limit. Although the attempt was unsuccessful, Scott never gave up, and that’s an amazing     15    .

Danger in the desert

That day we were deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert. There the     1       could often be compared to Mars. Our team of four female microbiologists watched as a car full of curious men pulled up beside us. Because we were strangers in a(n)       2     place, our minds immediately jumped to ways we could protect ourselves. So,     3     , our Chilean fellow guide lifted the strong tool she’d been using to dig up plant roots. The rest of us tried to look braver than we felt.

We had come to this desert to conduct DNA studies on giant horsetails that somehow grow well in one of Earth’s driest places. We were searching for plants in the most remote locations, where they would be     4     by human activities such as mining and agriculture.

We’d been warned that the trip could be dangerous. Because we were traveling so far from fuel sources, we were told to take along a can of gas. Our destination was at the end of a(n)     5       single-lane dirt road lined with burned-out vehicles that had not successfully negotiated the steep downslope. Our sample site was near a village, and the people might not, we were told,     6     positively to us. We were instructed to report our travel plans at the nearest police station so that search parties would know where to look for us if we disappeared.

We had found the amazing plants and their bright green stocks       7       over our heads. They aroused the     8       of ancient wetland plants. The men approached as we finished collecting our samples. We waited tensely as a man     9       the car and walked toward us. To our surprise and relief, he politely invited us to visit their village—they wanted to show us a lovely church of which they were proud. That day, we learned about more than the microbiomes that help desert plants grow well. We also met a(n)       10       community who had likewise beautifully adapted to their challenging home.

The King and the Royal Trees

The King had a frightful dream. He dreamt that while riding his horse through the Royal Forest, the south wind called: “Mind the falling tees! Mind the falling trees!”

Though the trees were beautiful and waved gently in the wind, the King was in     1    . He turned his horse and dashed out of the forest.

The next morning the King ordered his people to cut down all the trees in the kingdom. “We do not want the trees to fall down and hurt our children,” he reasoned. “We will     2     the forest and grow vegetables instead.”

The people liked the King’s idea, for now they had their     3     of the finest wood in the forest to build houses and furniture. And the rest of the trees were sold at     4     prices to neighboring kingdoms.

Once all of the trees were cut down, the King felt     5    —and relieved. But the people were gloomy. They missed the trees, which had     6     work for loggers and carpenters, and homes for birds. Although they sadly missed their work, they missed the birds most of all.

Soon after the trees were gone, a dry south wind began to blow. It blew day after day. The vegetable crops began to wither and die. People huddled(蜷缩)     7     in their houses watching the wind uproot their gardens and scatter the dead plants across the land.

The King was worried. He called for his horse and rode through the fields to inspect the     8     There were no more trees to break the fury of the wind. As the wind blew faster, it swept withered plants and soil past the King, who     9     dumbly as his kingdom blew northward.

Lost in clouds of dust and drifting sand, fatigue overcame the King. Nodding     10     in the saddle(马鞍), he heard the south wind call: “Mind the falling trees! Mind the falling tees!”

When Coca-Cola was first sold in 1886, nobody thought it could be improved. Nearly a century later, in 1985, New Coke was introduced to replace the original recipe of Coke in order to rebrand the product amidst falling sales——Coke was losing customers to Pepsi, whose sweeter taste was finding     1    . Unfortunately, the Coca-Cola Company saw a significant drop in sales soon after the release of New Coke. Some customers just preferred the “classic” recipe. The old adage(格言), “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” seems to apply here.

Something similar is happening with A Bite of China, a     2     food documentary focusing on the stories, traditions and culture surrounding interesting regional dishes from around China. The first two seasons of the show saw great success. However, when the third season began last month, the reviewers were not so “sweet”. With an entirely new production team, Season Three steers away from(偏离) the show’s core focus on     3     dishes and towards intimate life stories, non-food-related subject matter and even product placement(植入广告).

In the first episode of Season Two, a teenager in the countryside collects honey high up in a tree. The scene is stunningly filmed, telling a moving story about the dangerous     4     to which people go to gather food for their families. In the third season, however, the focus is taken almost completely away from the food. In one of its most infamous episodes, DIY lipstick using questionable ingredients bought online is     5    . Viewer response has been swift and severe, with several commentators wondering whether it is still suitable to call the show a food documentary. The production crew have     6     the changes, claiming that the innovation is meant to keep the show fresh and interesting to an expanding audience. While this may     7     in part, to explain the show’s creative differences from previous seasons, it doesn’t     8     the show’s declining professionalism, which has led to some silly mistakes such as mixing up ingredients or confusing the correct names of regional dishes.

Innovation is generally     9     in industries big and small, but a winning formula that has popular     10     is not necessarily something that requires changes. Innovation is a tool often best used when a new direction is called for. By trying to reinvent the wheel, one might just end up with a flat tire. It’s time that A Bite of China took a page out of Coca-Cola’s playbook and returned to the classic recipe, where success has never tasted so sweet.

The night before the March on Washington, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King asked his aides for advice about the next day’s speech. “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream’, his adviser Wyatt Walker told him. “You’ve used it too many times already.”

King had indeed employed the refrain（repeated sentences）several times before. It had featured in an address just a week earlier at a     1     in Chicago, and a few months before that at a huge rally in Detroit. As with most of his speeches, both had been well received, but neither had been regarded as momentous.

This speech had to be different. While King was by now a national political figure, relatively few outside the black church and the civil rights movement had heard him give a full     2    . With all three television networks offering live     3     of the march for jobs and freedom, this would be his oratorical（演说的）introduction to the nation.

After a wide range of conflicting suggestions from his staff, King left the lobby at the Willard hotel in DC to put the final     4     to a speech that he hoped would be received, in his words, “like the Gettysburg Address”.

A few floors below King’s suite, Walker made himself     5    . King would call down and tell him what he wanted to say; Walker would write something that he hoped worked, and then head up the stairs to     6     it to King.

King finished the outline at about midnight and then wrote a draft in longhand. One of his aides who went to King’s suite that night saw words     7     out three or four times. He thought it looked as though King were writing poetry. King went to sleep at about 4 am, giving the text to his aides to print and distribute. The “I have a dream” section was not in it.

A few hours after King went to sleep, the march’s organizer, Bayard Rustin,     8     on to the Washington Mall, where the demonstration would take place later that day, with some of his assistants, to find security personnel and journalists     9     demonstrators. Political marches in Washington are now commonplace, but in 1963 attempting to     10     a march of this size in that place was unprecedented.

An Excerpt from The Woods Were Tossing with Jewels

In 1899 when I was five years old and living in Palmetto, Florida, my father decided to take his family through the wilds of the Everglades and have a claim on an offshore island. His purpose was to farm this island but behind this was his wish to give us a     1     of the way he grew up. He had been a cowboy in the Myakka area when he was fifteen years old. These ranchlands overlapped the north end of the Everglades at a time when it was     2    .

His life was a series of     3    . He had lost a father and a brother in the Civil War. His father’s carriage house in Charleston, South Carolina, and his nearby plantation were in the line of Sherman’s march. His widow took her eight-year-old son, my father, and fled to Quincy, Florida. When Papa finished school at the academy there, he went to work as a cowboy on a ranch in Myakka for a friend of his dead father’s. By age thirty, he was a county sheriff, no     4     job in those days, and his territory was wide ranging. The county he served was later split up into six or eight counties.

South Florida was     5     to many because of the mosquitoes, panthers, crocodiles, swamps, and wetlands. But these marks of wild country called to my father like the     6     siren song.

He started building a covered wagon around the fourth of July and we went into the wilderness with him in the fall. We had made our home in Palmetto for a year or so where my mother’s gentle folks, the Harrisons, had settled following the Civil War. Our comfortable two- story frame house on the Manatee River was set about with live oaks, guavas, and long-leafed pine that branched out from the foot of the tree to     7     our cow and provide a roost for the chickens. My grandfather was the town doctor. He doctored the entire county and was paid in eggs and ham and vegetables when they were in     8    . It was an idyllic life, and we lived close to our family and to the     9     and safety a small town could afford. But Papa was a man of     10    ; he realized that the untouched Ten Thousand Islands off the southwest coast of the state were rich in soil for crops and in game for food.