1 . At Bookmark, we want every single child to read. Many children in the average class in the UK are not _________ to read well when they leave primary school. We need more reading _________ to help us change this. With Bookmark, you can truly make a ________ to the futures of primary school children. One Bookmark volunteer has _________ her story.

Claire began reading with Zach in 2019 at a local school. Her ________ as a Bookmark volunteer taught her more than she expected. During their sessions, Claire _________ Zach to see reading as fun. _________, he asked Claire why anyone would read in their spare time. Seeing this as an opportunity, she ________ to him that there are books out there on all his favorite hobbies.

As their sessions continued, Claire noticed a _________. When packing up in their final session, Zach __________ a book. It was a more advanced ________ than those he’d been reading, but he __________ said that he was happy and confident to give it a go at home. At that moment, Claire started to _________ her impact as a Bookmark volunteer.

Enjoying reading is a powerful tool for a primary school child. Reading for _________ provides a route into learning and opens many opportunities. For young readers, this joy __________ confidence both in the classroom and at home.

2 . 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.

4 . Now that we have briefly explored the history of the short story and heard from a few of its creators, let us consider the role of the reader. Readers are not empty vessels that wait, _______ raised, to receive a teacher’s or a critic’s interpretation. They bring their unique life experiences to the story. With these_______ , the best readers also bring their attention, their reading skills, and most importantly, their_______ to a reading of a story.

My students always_______ me to discuss, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the stories we read without destroying the excitement of being beamed up into another world. For years I _______with one response after the other to this challenge. Then one day I read an article by a botanist who had explored the beauty of flowers by x-raying them. His illustrations showed the rose and the lily in their_______ beauty, and his x-rays_______the wonders of their construction. I brought the article to class, where we discussed the benefits of examining the internal structure of flowers, relationships, current events, and short stories.

A short story, _______ , is not a fossil to admire. Readers must ask questions, guess at the answers,_______what will happen next, then read to discover. They and the author form a partnership that brings the story to life. Awareness of this partnership keeps the original excitement alive through discussion, analysis, interpretation, and ________. Literary explorations allow the reader to admire the authors’________ as well as their artistry. In fact, original appreciation may be enhanced by this x-ray vision. The final step is to appreciate once again the story________— to put the pieces back together.

Now it is your turn. Form a partnership with your author. During your________in reading, enter into a dialogue with the published scholars featured in Short Stories for Students. Through this________with experts you will revise, enrich, or________your original observations and interpretations.

During this adventure, I hope you will feel the same as the listeners that surround the neck of my Pueblo storyteller.

5 . I have to admit I’m an old-school reader. Put simply, I   _______old books.

Alone in a new city to _______my first daily newspaper job, I was feeling vaguely anxious as I dipped into a used   bookstore to_______my   mind. The   shelves, full of the smell of the past, quickly_______me. One of the occupational hazards (职业病) of journalism, my chosen_______, is a desire to stay on top of the Next Big Thing. With their cracked spines (书脊) and yellowed_______, the titles in the shop usefully pointed me toward the longer view. “No_______to get too worked up over today’s headline,” they seemed to say. “ There is not much _______ under the sun.”

Francis Bacon’s essays are always a ready antidote (解药). “Prosperity (繁荣) is not without many___ and dislikes,” Bacon wrote, and“___ is not without comforts and hopes.” For me, that comfort and hope often come from a second-hand____.

Reading deeply from the   past can be   at   least as______ as   following the day’s   news. Don’t _____     missing out on the___ gossip. All matters of fact, which a man did not___ before, are news to him.

6 . I was born in India. My dad was a busy doctor, but the best thing he did was to______the Reader’s Digest. He didn’t read_____but the Digest and the Illustrated Weekly of India, because he said they were the only stylish magazines. We looked forward to the RD monthly, simply because we loved them. ______, the postman didn’t at all like the day he brought it. My siblings and I used to ______ him by pulling it from his hand, ______the packing and throwing that back in his bag.

We used to fight for the magazine so much that he nearly fell off his______once!

Realizing what a group of ______youngsters he had to encounter, he soon learned his lesson and always got off his bike______he rang the doorbell, especially on the day the RD had to be______!

It was only when I was 17 that I fully understood the ______ pages. I had an irritating habit of laughing out loud, which I did, in the______places. Once I was travelling to London with my parents. Lost in the jokes from Reader’s Digest, I burst out laughing. People were staring at me in ____ ; my parents were embarrassed, but I was____of all that, and just enjoyed reading my Digest.

______, I started reading all the articles in the RD, and I must say I truly enjoyed reading the magazine from cover to cover. I am now 65 years old. Reader ‘s Digest has ______over the years, but I have not stopped reading. I even got my own subscription.

7 . To beat the blues of staying at home all day, I _______ an ‘online book exchange’ on account of my friends. Details were _______ to understand, and I spent hours trying to make it clear.

I had my doubts, though. For one, it involved _______ a copy of your favorite book to a complete stranger, and then waiting for a series of people to _______ the chain, till you received some books _______, from complete strangers. A natural pessimist I am, I _______ if I would receive any books. But _______, I sent a copy of my favorite, Jeffrey Arche’s The Eleventh Commandment, to a stranger. Days later, I was _______ when the first book arrived! And soon followed another 10 books that I had never in my wildest dreams imagined I would receive. Over the next two weeks, books kept _______, ranging from Dr Abdul Kalam’s autobiography (自传) to Charlotte Jane Eyre and a bestselling Japanese thriller. I even ________ my afternoon nap (午觉), ready to open the door ________ another book was delivered.

There is something intimate (亲密的) about exchanging books with strangers. By ________ a book with someone, I believe we end up sharing a part of our soul with them.

The posting about the book exchange on social media brought me ________ to many old friends, with whom I had lost touch due to the ________ schedules we all had before COVID-19 ________ our plans. It fired long discussions about trying out wine in Vietnam.

10 . Steph Clemence always intended to go to college. ________ when her father died in a car accident, leaving her mother to support three daughters on a ________ income, paying for college became out of the question.

________ going to college, Steph found a job, and tried to________ what to do with a life so different from her plan. The ________came from two pages from her English teacher, Dorothy Clark. One afternoon she walked into the classroom carrying a stack of papers titled “Mrs. Clark’s Book List.” It wasn’t homework, the teacher announced, but it could be a road ________ .“Some of you might not go on to higher education,“ Mrs. Clark said, “but you can ________ to learn.”

“I was determined to ________ myself,” Steph says. She studied the ________ and so it began. Each of those books sparked her ________ to learn more. “Reading books is like a treasure hunt,” says Steph. “What am I going to ________ ? How will my heart change?” That made her look for other books that weren’t on the list, hoping to ________ her knowledge.

When the original list ________, she typed up a new copy. And then another. Over the years, the family moved around a lot. Through it all, the reading list was a ________ in Steph’s life, traveling with her even on vacations. Now Steph is 70, and she never did get to college. But she has only four books ________ to read from the list. She expects to complete them sometime in 2023.