1 . A Heroic Driver

Larry works with Transport Drivers,   Inc.   One morning in 2009, Larry was ______along 165 north after delivering to one of his _______. Suddenly, he saw a car with its bright lights on. _______ he got closer, he found ____ vehicle upside down on the road. One more look and he noticed _______ shooting out from under the _______ vehicle. Larry pulled over, set the brake and _______the fire extinguisher (灭火器). Two good bursts from the extinguisher and the fire was put out.

The man who had his bright lights on _______ and told Larry he had _______ an emergency call. They ________ heard a woman’s voice coming from the wrecked (毁坏的) vehicle. ________the vehicle, they saw that a woman was trying to get out of the broken window. They told her to stay ________ until the emergency personnel arrived, ________ she thought the car was going to ________. Larry told her that he had already put out the fire and she should not move ________ she injured her neck.

Once fire and emergency people arrived, Larry and the other man ________ and let them go to work. Then, Larry asked the ________ if he was needed or ________ to go. They let him and the other man go.

One thing is ________—Larry went above and beyond the call of duty by getting so close to the burning vehicle! His ________ most likely saved the woman’s life.

2 . I was recently involved in a bad traffic accident. I was knocked unconscious by the impact so I don’t __ anything about the accident. My first memory is being given oxygen as the doctors and nurses tried to ____ me back to life.

As I lay in the emergency room, I found myself ____ my life and thanking God that I was still __. The good news is that nobody else was __.

Since that day, the physical recovery has been __ but not as tough as the emotional recovery. I've learned a lot about myself and about what really ____ in this world. Things that are really important are not“things”. I’m not invincible(无敌的)and I cannot ____ everything that happens in my life. I need to be better at ____ the things that come into my way that I didn’t plan for. As someone who was always in a ____，it taught me to slow down a little. I have learned to live each day honestly and ____.

___ I continue to heal physically and emotionally，I have a different opinion on ____ . When tragedy strikes，you can either let it ____ your spirit，or use it as an opportunity to grow. I have chosen to ____ from it.

“It’s not looking too good, darling, I think you’d better pack a few things and go to your mother’s place. And you’d better take Rosie and Monty with you.”

Putting down the phone, Sara sighed. Tomorrow was her husband Tony’s birthday. She had planned to cook him a nice meal and then surprise him with the new mountain bike she’d bought for him. If she went to her mother’s house, Tony wouldn’t get his present for days.

However, her mother’s house was the best place to be right now. Being on higher land, it would be safe from the floods. It had been raining heavily for almost two weeks and the river near Sara and Tony’s house was rising higher and higher all the time. Tony and others from the village had spent the last two days putting sandbags along the side of the river to stop it from overflowing. Now they feared that their hard work had been useless and soon the whole valley would be flooded.

Sara dressed baby James in warm clothes and collected the things she would need for him over the next few days. She put the lead on the dog and went in search of Monty, the cat. It took her a long time, but eventually she found him safe and warm under the covers on her bed. She placed him in his cat basket and took him into the kitchen where James and the dog, Rosie, were waiting.

Just as she was reaching for the car keys, Sarah heard a sound like the noise bath water makes when you pull out the plug. She looked at the backdoor, water was flowing in underneath. Turning around, she saw dirty brown water fountaining out of the drain and filling the sink. Realizing that they were trapped by the flood and it became impossible for her to drive out, quickly she put James into her backpack and pulled onto her back. Calling to Rosie, she picked up the cat basket and ran to the front of the house and out into the front garden, where the car was parked.

The water was already up to her knees, and Rosie was swimming beside her.

Sara, together with James, Rosie and Monty, was hungry and frightened on the roof of the house when a boat appeared in the distance.

Rescue in a Bottle

Curtis Whitson had rafted (v.乘筏) down the Arroyo Seco, a river in central California, several times before.

This year, Curtis Whitson knew the water-fall was coming. He figured he would get out of his raft into the shallow water, get down the rocks along ropes on either side of the falls, and continue on his way, as he had on a previous trip.

But this year was different. Heavy snow and spring rains had turned the usually manageable falls into something fierce. And this year, instead of his friends, Whitson’s companions were his girlfriend, Krystal Ramirez, and his 13-year-old son, Hunter. As the three of them approached the falls late in the afternoon of the third day of their camping trip, Whitson could tell from the increasing roar of water in the narrowing canyon(峡谷) that they were in serious trouble. There was no way they’d be able to get down the rocks as planned.

“The water was just roaring through there with tremendous force,” recalls Whitson, 45.

They had no smart phone service, and they hadn’t seen a single person in the past three days. And Whitson knew that they’d be sharing the ground there with rattlesnakes and mountain lions.

As he was thinking what to do, Whitson hit on a bit of luck---he heard voices coming from the other side of the falls. He yelled, but the sound of the rushing water drowned him out.

“We have to get these people a message,” Whitson thought.

He grabbed a stick and pulled out his pocketknife to carve “Help” in it. Then he tied a rope to it so the people would know it wasn’t just any stick. He tried throwing it over the falls, but it floated away in the wrong direction.

“We’ve got to do something!” Whitson yelled to his son. “Have we got anything else?”

Then he spotted his water bottle. Whitson grabbed it and carved “Help!”on it. Ramirez also reminded him that he had a pen and paper in his backpack.

Whitson knew it was a slim hope. But he wrote “6-15 19:00 We are stuck here@ the waterfall. Get help please” and pushed the note into the bottle. This time, his throw over the waterfall was perfect.

“All right, that’s all we can do,” Whitson told Hunter.

It took 30 minutes to get back upstream to the beach where they’d had lunch.

The next morning, the helicopter returned.

Snow began to fall across the Apennines Mountain in January and lasted for days. From his home in the suburbs, Matrone watched the weather with concern. He and his wife, Cicioni, had planned an overnight getaway to the hotel halfway up the mountain. But now he wondered whether they should go. After phoning the hotel, they decided to make the trip. When they finally arrived six hours later, they were both cold and exhausted. They checked into their room and went to bed early.

As they awoke the next day, they discovered that their difficulty had worsened overnight. The cars in the parking lot were invisible. The phone and power lines were down. Many people were digging their cars.

With a dozen vehicles freed by noon, the guests set off down the driveway. But when they reached the main road, the path was blocked by a six-foot-high wall of snow. Matrone climbed out of his car and there was no road in sight. “We're trapped! he told his wife. So they had no choice but to make their way back to the hotel.

As it was getting dark, they managed to be back. That was when the snow on the mountain began to slide. They heard the avalanche（雪崩）before they saw it. The avalanche gathered speed and size, grabbing anything in its way down the mountain and tearing the hotel from its foundation. When the avalanche came to a stop, those caught inside the hotel were left buried in the icy rocks and ruins.

When Matrone came to himself, he was stuck in the darkness. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It was not until the next morning that the rescuers finally arrived.___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

7 . The sound that woke Damian Languell at 8:15 in the morning was so loud he assumed it came from inside his house in Wade, Maine. As he got up to investigate, he heard another sound, this one coming most definitely from outside. Looking out of his bedroom window, he noticed a tree enveloped in smoke about 500 yards away. A car wrapped around the tree's base, its engine on fire.

Grabbing buckets of water, he and his wife ran to the crash site. Up close, the accident looked worse. The car was split nearly in two, and the tree was where the driver's seat ought to have been, as if planted there. No one should have survived this crash, and yet there was 20- year-old Quintin Thompson, his terrified face pressed against the driver's side window, in visible pain.

Languell tried putting out the fire with his buckets of water but failed. When the flames got into the front seats, he knew he had to get the young man out. So Languell opened the car's back door and climbed in. Using a pocket knife he'd brought with him, he cut through Thompson's seat belt. Now that Thompson was free, Languell pulled him out, and dragged him to safety before the entire car was in flames.

It is empathy that drove Languell to help, just as he said, "My heart goes out to Thompson. When you are that close to that level of hurt, you feel it so directly." For his heroic action, Languell was added to the list of real-life heroes changing the world.

10 . The snow trapped Taylor, but taco sauce (卷饼酱) saved his life. It all began last Sunday when Taylor, along with his dog, went to get gas for his ______, according to the Sheriff’s Office.

Taylor told the police his car got ______ in the snow. After some time, he then ______     and woke up on Monday finding ______ more snow, unable to get out of the vehicle (车辆). He tried to ______ out on Monday, but the snow was too deep and made it ______ to go on foot so he and his dog ______ to the vehicle.

By Wednesday, a ______ person’s announcement was put out for Taylor, according to a report. Over the next few days ______ he was trapped in the snow, Taylor told the police he stayed ______ by “starting his car from time to time. He ______ some of the taco sauce he had as food”.

On Friday, a skater called 911 saying they had ______ Taylor. The office soon sent a construction truck to ______ out Taylor and his dog. The officers said they were just “hungry after being stuck in the ______ for five days”. Taylor was ______ to who helped him and determined to help others as possible as he could in future.