1 . “What’s the story of your piano?” a friend asked over dinner. My piano just _________ in the corner of my living room. “It has a story?” I doubted.

“All pianos have stories,” she replied. Suddenly my piano’s story came _________ out of me as if I’d always had this tale to tell.

I’ve loved _________ since childhood. I started with the recorder and moved on to the violin and guitar. Playing the piano had always been my _________ which my family couldn’t afford. I grew up in a poor immigrant family in Toronto. My father _________ tables in a restaurant and my mother worked in a laundry. Though our childhood was _________, my brothers and I were always fed with     _________. I can’t remember which birthday it was when my mother _________ some money to buy me a doll. By then I’d outgrown wanting dolls but she worked too hard to know that and I never told her. I _________ accepted it.

So it was finally with my ____________. It was in my last year of high school. I took piano lessons for about a year before university forced me to ____________. I had to make a decision: to pursue（追求） a more ____________ goal of medical school or my love for music. The realist in me ____________ and I had to give up piano lessons ____________ as with my doll it was too late to learn to play the way I wanted. I ____________ the piano around with me over the next decade until my son was born. He showed an early ____________ in music so I put him in piano lessons. I played that piano through my son although guitar ____________ became his choice.

I gradually realized that I’d let all my pleasures ____________ for my job. I figured I’d get back to playing the piano when I retire. Maybe it’s time to get that piano tuned again before it’s too late to     ____________. Maybe that’s something we should do right now.

Sometimes a ____________ question can open a path of thinking and discovery. So what’s the story of your piano?

2 . It was a cool October evening. Excitement and family members _______the hall. I was only a 7-year-old girl, but I was the center of _______. Finally, after weeks of preparation, I would _______all my hard work in a dance of performance. “Everything would be_______”, I thought. I waited backstage all _______ in my black tights with a golden belt. In a loud and clear voice, the master of ceremonies _______that my class was next.

My dance class was doing a routine on wooden boxes two feet by two feet, facing the _______. All I had to do in the next move was put one foot on the box next to mine and keep my other foot on my box. It really was an _______ move. I was concentrating so much _______the huge smile on my face and holding my head up that I did not look________I was going. I missed my partner’s box altogether and ________. There I was standing on the stage floor when my classmates were on top of their boxes. I could hear giggles coming from the audience, and I felt the ________rush to my face. I remembered my dance teacher had told us, “If you make a mistake, keep smiling so the audience will not ________.” I did my best to follow her ________ as I continued with the routine.

When the curtain dropped, so did my ________for the evening. I ________bitterly, tasting the salt from the tears that streamed down my face. I ran backstage, but no one could ________me down.

Recently I realized I had been a ________that night. I was ________, but I fought the urge to run off the stage. ________, I finished the routine with a smile on my face. Now when friends and family laugh about the time I slipped during a dance performance, I can laugh too.

4 . A pirate’s life no more

HONEST souls intent on paying for the music they listened to used to have a hard time in China. In the era of compact discs, _______ was the shop which did not sell pirated（盗版的） ones. The same held true when discs turned into downloads and online streams of songs: hardly any _________ charged money.

Yet this is changing. Slowly, but _______, China is becoming a market where people pay for music. Over the past five years, digital-music revenues for the recording industry nearly quadrupled, to $195m; most of that amount comes from music streaming (see chart). That sum may still be a tiny fraction of the global total of $7.8bn, but streaming has clearly taken off in China.

Not everybody is paying: of the 600m Chinese who listen to music online only 20m have a paid subscription, which costs between 8 and 12 yuan a month. The rest _______ for nothing, but many do so on legal, advertising-supported services. “Piracy is _______.” says Ed Peto of Outdustry, a firm in Beijing offering services to the music industry.

If Chinese consumers have developed a liking for _______ listening, it is for a combination of reasons. Smartphones, which have become popular in recent years, make it easy to _______ to streaming services. Widespread use of apps such as Alipay and WeChat Pay mean that younger Chinese, in particular, are now used to making small purchases _______. And, to take advantage of the commercial opportunities in music, China’s big internet platforms have begun to fight piracy.

Not all is _______, however. The streaming market is ________ by one player: Tencent, the largest of China’s online giants, which is best known for its WeChat messaging service. According to some estimates, its market share exceeds 70%. Each of the company’s two leading streaming brands, QQ Music and KuGou, ________ hundreds of millions of users.

One cause for this market concentration is acquisitions: last year Tencent bought two big competitors. More important, ________, it has paid three major international record labels—Warner Music Group, Sony Music and Universal Music Group—a big, but unknown, sum for the ________ right to stream their music in China. This means that Tencent gets to decide which songs rivals are ________ to play.

Tencent executives say that they need such exclusivity to ensure the legitimacy of streaming services and to reduce piracy further. But having one firm have so much power “is never healthy”, says an executive at a rival firm. With the market growing quickly, the labels may ________ their deals with Tencent when they come up for renewal.