1 . I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria.I was a(n) _________reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books.I began to write when I was seven.I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my _________ were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples, and they talked a lot about the _________，how lovely it was that the sun had _________.

What this demonstrates is how _________we can be influenced by what we read, particularly as children. Because all I had read were foreign books, I had become _________ that books had to have _________ in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.

Things _________ when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to _________ as the foreign books.

But __________ writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental __________in my view of literature.I __________ that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate,could also __________ in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. What the __________ of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a __________ story of what books are.

2 . Three mornings a week, Iona walks six blocks from Eastern High School to Payne Elementary School. She ________ at the front desk just after 8: 30 a. m. and makes her way to a ________ , where she’ll be teaching second-and third-graders who are full of energy after the school day.

Iona, a senior at Eastern High, ________ this work back in the ninth grade. It’s run by Reach, a Washington D. C. nonprofit, which trains high school ________ like her to be reading tutors (教师) for elementary school students. It’s a tutoring program that works in two ________ . It’s serving a(n) ________ need in the city: Two-thirds of students in D. C. public schools can’t ________ and write at grade level when they start high school. Reach ________ these older students to become ________ readers by giving them the tools to teach younger kids.

Tutoring programs that ________ younger and older students are ________ . But most rely on ________ students. Reach turns the ________ on its head: Most of the teenage tutors start the ________ reading between the fourth-and sixth-grade level... The tutors ________ training in literacy (读写能力) instruction and they’re ________ as role models. With Reach, teens are given the ________ of helping a younger student. That’s a big ________ for them.

Iona says she ________ reading a lot more than she did when she started almost four years ago. She hasn’t decided on her future plans, but she does ________ one thing: She wants to work with kids.

3 . The brown bear was walking quietly behind the pink duck, ready to put his paws around her neck and throw her into a pot of boiling soup.

We turned the________. While I laughed quietly at the impracticality of a bear boiling water to________a duck, I lifted my head to find little Victoria sat huddled next to my am, honestly________to turn the page and find her favorite pink creature in a bear's________.

My________began to wander. I________the Thursday when Victoria ran into the reading room showing a golden certificate from her________. "Best reader," it showed. A smile came across my face as I looked into the eyes of the 7-year-old who just last year was________in first grade________her reading was quite poor.

It was the same________that had filled my face six months before, when Victoria joined the________program. After spending the first term answering a lot of questions, I________that Victoria's talkative nature and________for answers overshadow her desire to________and read. I________her energy and great curiosity and fueled it with my own enthusiasm. For every________she presented, I took her to scan the library shelves________a related book. I watched her eyes grow with excitement as I________helped her press through the stories, a journey in search of her ________.

Though I go to the library each week to be these kids'________, I come out, having been their student. They have introduced me to a side of me who I never realized existed.