1 . Emily Bhatnagar is a shy girl who has always loved reading. She says, “The books sort of became my best friends when I didn’t have one.”

When Bhatnagar was 16, her father was diagnosed (诊断) with cancer. The news was________for the family. Books became an even bigger ________, and she started thinking about families in similar situations. When her father recovered, she ________a plan to help others. “The idea came from not just great thanks that the doctors were able to ________such a miracle (奇迹),”she said, “but also a little of ________ that there were kids who were ________ the same battle.”

Bhatnagar started a ________ in her hometown. The goal was to collect books and give them to kids being ________ for cancer in local hospitals. Since the start of the book drive, which she called For Love & Buttercup, Bhatnagar has ________ more than 10,000 books.

Bhatnagar had no idea how much ________ her work would get. She started by posting on social media, asking people in her area to donate. “I was expecting maybe two or three ________ from neighbors,” she said. But it ended up blowing up, ________ when news stations began reporting it. “The public response has been super great,” her father said.

Bhatnagar continues to run the book drive, with a little help from her parents. She hopes to expand the project to ________ more kids one day. The memory of the first time she visited those children who’d ________ her books sticks with her. “It was the best ________ of my life,” she said. “I realized I wanted to do this type of work forever.”

2 . Like many parents, I enjoyed reading a bedtime story to my two sons each night before they went to bed. After the story was over, we would turn off the lights, and talked until they fell _________

One night after the lights were off, my 3-year-old son, Will, _________ me to tell them a story_________ by myself, not one from a book. So I _________ told him a story about the first thing that came into my _________. But to my surprise, he _________ it so much that he asked me to do that the next night.

Thus a story-telling tradition was _________ in our family. Ever since that night, they seemed not to be able to sleep without hearing one of my _________ stories. Of all the things I do for my _________ ,my storytelling is what they love most. It has created a special __________ between us. And they find that their day isn’t __________ without one of my stories, and so do I.

When I see how __________ my storytelling is in their lives, I come to realize how much our television and video-oriented (以视频为导向的) society has __________in terms of the personal connections that storytelling brings. Before the __________ of television, computers and smartphones, a family’s __________was built around storytelling. This oral (口述的) tradition was __________ from generation to generation, and many of the stories we have today originated from this tradition until someone finally __________them down.

Storytelling is used as a creative way to __________ for me. During the storytelling, I forget about the pressure of the day and enjoy the __________ time I can spend with my children. I hope that other parents can gain __________ from storytelling, too.