2 . Directions: Complete the following passages by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. overnight 　　　B. flash 　　　C. share 　　　D. enormous　　　 E. endured　　　 F. rise G. lengthy 　　　H. places　　　 I. pursue 　　　J. reflected 　　　K. plentiful

Robert Frost had aimed to be a poet since he was a teenager. But the American literary icon would not publish his first book of poetry until he was 39, and his best works would not follow until he was well into middle and old age. “Young people are good at discovering. They have a     1     here and there. It is like the stars coming out in the early evening,” he     2     at age 63, but “it is later in the dark of life that you see forms, patterns”

Frost’s     3     journey to fame during the dark of life, however, is far from the road less taken. Despite science society and silicon valley’s common belief that creativity, innovation and excellence are the near-exclusive province of the young, a surprising number of late bloomers mark the records of human history — women and men who     4     years of hardship, failure and missed opportunities before making an impact in the later stages of life. And once you move past the impressive stare of history’s Mozart-like geniuses, you find that late bloomers are quite     5    : in fact, there are many more roads to becoming an old master than a young prodigy.

Sometimes you don’t discover your passion in life until you’ve done some other things first. Sometimes you don’t get the opportunity to make the most of your experiences until relatively late in life. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, didn’t start building his business empire until he was 53 years old. Until that point, the former Red Cross ambulance driver was a traveling salesman, peddling milk shake machines and paper cups. “I was a(n)     6     success all right,” Kroc wrote in his autobiography, “but 30 years is a long, long night.”

Sometimes, instead of opportunities, life     7     obstacles on the road to success. It wasn’t until Laura Ingalls Wilder turned 65 that her epic Little House on the Prairie series was published. By then, she had already devoted decades to being a farm wife and mother, schoolteacher, loan officer and newspaper columnist, and she had endured more than her fair     8     of hardship, from droughts to house fires. Another influential writer, Miguel de Cervantes, wrote Don Quixote in his late 50s after an eventful life in which he spent years behind bars and as a captive of Barbary pirates.

Therefore, unlike the youthful genius, whose rocket-fast     9     impresses as well as depresses the rest of the world, the late bloomer demonstrates what is possible as people     10     their own versions of full bloom.

3 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

The Historical Change of Reader’s Digest

During World War I, Mr. DeWitt Wallace was wounded in a battle. During his recovery in the hospital, he read a lot of magazines and     1     a lot of interesting information. At the same time, he also found that few people had time to read so many magazines that he realized the idea of excerpting (摘录) these articles and publishing them.

He was     2     to publish a pocket magazine they called Reader’s Digest with his wife Lila Acheson. They opened an office downstairs in an illegal hotel in Greenwich Village, New York, and spent only $5,000 in capital and began     3     subscribers. After a period of hard work, the first volume was     4     published on February 5, 1922. Its purpose is to inform the readers in daily life and give the readers entertainment, encouragement and guidance. The first article,     5     How to Stay Young Mentally, was one and a half pages long.

In 1920, he put     6     selected articles into Reader’s Digest samples and displayed them to major publishers in the United States. He hoped that someone would be willing to publish them, but they were all     7    . Mr. Wallace did not give up and decided to publish it himself. He worked at home with his wife, and finally published the first issue of Reader’s Digest in February 1922. The first was printed in 5,000 copies,     8     at 25 cents, and sent to 1,500 payment subscribers by mail. By 1935, the circulation of Reader’s Digest had reached one million copies.

The Chinese     9     of Reader’s Digest was first published in March 1965. The first editor-in-chief was Lin Taiyi, the daughter of Mr. Lin Yutang, master of literature. In November 2004, Reader’s Digest and Shanghai Press and Publication Bureau announced the       10     of a long-term publishing cooperation.