1 . Castillo wrote a letter to her father for his 50th birthday. Her father, who suffers from Down’s syndrome (唐氏综合征), had at one point been a(n) _________ in her life. But in her letter, she wanted the world to know how much she _________ and loves her father.

Castillo said it took years before she had the courage to _________ the truth about her situation and her father. She got bullied at school because the other kids saw her father as “_________”. She didn’t understand at the time why the kids were bullying her. _________, she thought of herself as a “coward daughter”.

“You _________ love, understanding, patience and acceptance as any individual with Down’s syndrome should,” she wrote.

Besides having Down’s syndrome, her father has a wide _________ of health complication (并发症). Therefore, her father has been in and out of the hospital getting all sorts of _________. Castillo wrote that her father is the “most _________ person” because of what he went through, yet he rarely complained. But there were times when he couldn’t __________ the pain and broke down in tears, which hurt her greatly and made her cry. But her dad kept persisting (坚持), which gave her __________.

“Dad, no words can sum up how __________ I am for being a(n) __________ daughter. If there is one thing I regret, it is __________ you from my life because I was afraid of getting bullied. But I love you more than you could ever __________ and I am always inspired by you,” she wrote.

2 . “Keep staring! I might do a _______!” That’s the message on a T shirt of mine.

People stare at me all the time so I thought this shirt would be funny. See, I’m a dwarf(侏儒). Most of the time people aren’t trying to be _______ they just haven’t seen many dwarfs like me before. I can_______ that,but I also want to let them know that I see them staring.   

I was born with achondroplasia(软骨发育不全症), the most _______form of dwarfism. Right now, I am almost four feet tall and that’s _______ as tall as I’m going to get.

I’m not going to pretend my height isn’t a _______. It is light switches and _______ are usually too high for me. It takes me almost three steps to _______ one step of an average size adult and my mom has to shorten almost all of my _______ .

But everyone faces challenges. You have to face them with a good attitude. So, I have a long barbecue fork to ________ things from shelves and drive a car with the help of pedal ________. If all else fails, I ask for things. The way I see it, I can do just about ________that an average size person can do. I’ll never play professional sports, but I have no problem ________ my limits. It may take me longer and it may be harder, but I can still do it.

My shirt shows people the ________ me a kid with a sense of humor. And maybe that’s the trick showing others that I’m just like them. I’m just shorter, but I’m ________ of who I am.

I sat down to watch a recorded TV play after my husband left for his night-shift job. Not ten minutes into my favorite TV play, I was alerted to the unmistakable beep (哔哔声) of the smoke alarm indicating a low battery. Sighing, I paused my program and got up from the sofa.

I got a stepladder, climbed up it and quickly replaced the battery. The second I sat down and started watching my play, the beep started again. Evidently, the replacement battery was dead, too, so I went through all the motions again. I’d barely picked up the remote and pressed Play a third time when the alarm went off yet again. I gave out some unladylike comments. This time, I was one rung down when the same thing happened.

By then, I was out of all the batteries. I had to search the entire house for some electronic equipment that housed the same kind. I finally found one in an old clock. I crossed my fingers, hoping the battery still had some juice, and popped it in.

No luck! That round, plastic thing that was designed to save lives was about to make me have a nervous breakdown! Frustrated, I pulled the entire thing out of its “nest” and actually yelled at it to shut up before I tore it up into pieces. Holding it, I climbed back down and almost killed myself by practically falling over the dog and two cats who always watched every move I made and every breath I took. Driving my pet s away, I threw the alarm on the table and reminded myself to sleep fully clothed in case I smelled smoke. Carbon-monoxide (一氧化碳) detection would be taken care of by our back up alarm downstairs.

I glared at the troublesome item once more before walking off to seat myself on the sofa again. My program was already forty-five minutes into the play because I’d forgotten to pause it. Within seconds, that sound hit my ears again!

Once upon a time, in a small town located near the edge of a vast forest, two adventurous souls named John and David had long been keen to go deep into the heart of nature. One day, armed with their backpacks, they determined to explore the forest. The villagers had warned them to stick to the main path, cautioning that there could be hunters’ traps elsewhere, but the appeal of the charming forest was too great to resist.

As they confidently ventured deeper into the forest, its beauty unfolded before their eyes. An hour later, driven by the hunger for the unknown, they made a decision to take the less-traveled path, making marks along the way carefully as they went. For another two hours, they observed various flowers, took pictures of strange-shaped rocks and marveled at the breathtaking scenery. The forest seemed to be a world of its own, untouched by human presence. Everything appeared so beautiful.

However, little did they know that danger was hidden under their feet. As they went further, they realized that their phones had lost signal, and they were completely cut off from the outside world. Suddenly, John stepped forward and felt the ground gave way beneath him. Before he knew it, he had fallen into a hidden pit(深坑), his leg trapped by the wooden spikes(尖刺) lining the bottom. Pain shot through his body as he cried out for help.

Upon hearing John’s crying out in pain, David quickly ran to the edge of the pit, desperately trying to find a way to pull his friend out. However, his efforts were in vain. “John, are you okay? Can you move your leg?” asked David worriedly. John winced in pain as he tried to move his injured leg, “I think I’ve hurt my leg, David. It aches a lot.” “It’s going to be okay, John,” David comforted him, “I’ll find a way to get you out of here!” With no phone signal and nightfall approaching, David knew he had to act fast.

He couldn’t pull John out of the pit, so he decided to get out and seek help.

Together, they journeyed back to where John awaited rescue.

Thank You, Mr. Baumgartner

If I hadn’t been a failed violinist, I might never have become a writer.

When I was in fourth grade, the public school I attended had an orchestra (管弦乐) program. I signed up to learn the violin, along with my friend Irene Cervantes. We were both interested in the violin and the bright future of being in the orchestra. Every week, Irene and I walked together through our working-class neighborhood to our before-school music lessons, proudly holding our black violin cases.

Mr. Baumgartner, the orchestra teacher, was very strict. He emphasized that if anything happened to the instrument we played we’d be cut from the program because the school could not afford to replace it. We all understood.

I wasn’t very good at the violin. Then the scary thing happened: I was practicing at home when the bridge dropped off my violin and flew across the room, the strings collapsing (塌陷) before my eyes.

Terrified of Mr. Baumgartner’s reaction, and having no idea that this was a common violinist’s mistake, I tried to fix it. I slipped into the garage and secured the bridge back in place with an unfamiliar glue, making sure it would never, never, drop off again. I prayed that Mr. Baumgartner wouldn’t notice.

Of course, he did. Sadly, he patted me on the back and told me that maybe I could join the orchestra next year. When I cried, he suggested that I join a chorus (合唱团).

I did switch to the chorus, where I stayed. As luck would have it, the elementary school orchestra automatically fed into the junior high chorus — which performed with the All City Honor Orchestra on New Year’s Eve, where Irene Cervantes was now the first-chair violinist.

After the performance, my English teacher, who was the advisor for the school newspaper, asked if anyone was a member of the chorus and would be interested in writing an article for the school newspaper about the experience. Something inside me made me raise my hand. I loved reading, but the idea of writing anything had never occurred to me until then.

9 . That gentle attendant might have said something like, Excusez-moi? Or Pardon? But I could not even register (表达出) that he was speaking to me. I, in Paris for the very first time, was apparently deaf to even the cues (提示) of vocal tone and facial expression. Though I knew that my French was not good, it was then that I realized just being able to count to 15 and say “Je m’appelle Kyla” was not going to work.

I had tried very hard to learn some French before I went on my long-weekend. Despite all the available resources, I’d really had no intention of studying French in a meaningful way until I was in Paris. But as soon as I’d made up my mind, I ran into a roadblock. As a teenager. I’d learned Spanish almost passively, never receiving less than an A. Meanwhile, I’d taken Russian for a year, and learning a new alphabet and its grammar had given me an almost unshakable sense of confidence. So why, when trying to take up French, a language closest to English, could I not even remember how to use the most ordinary verb, etre?

When, months after my trip, I still hadn’t gotten much further, I started to wonder... am I bad at this? And though I was only in my 30s, was my lack of facility a result of aging?

Yet alongside my frustration (沮丧), a surprising feeling emerged. Not discouragement—but delight in my failure. At 32, having lived in the same city for over ten years, having finished school and started a career, having achieved many of the milestones of young adulthood, it had been so long since I’d been an absolute beginner that being bad at something actually felt refreshing.

What so many people experience when they travel is the realization of how big the world is and how much more of it there is than you could have imagined. That’s what I gained—an expanded sense of belief, not limited by what I had already seen; a humble belief in the power of what I didn’t yet know.