3 . It was an amazing feeling to be acknowledged for the Pride Of Britain award at No 10 Downing Street.

The last thing you expect when doing something as ordinary as picking your son up from a sleepover is to end up saving three people’s lives in a plane crash—but that’s exactly what happened to me in May this year.

I think I was acting unconsciously. I jumped out, leaving Giacomo in the car.

The plane was upside down and flames were coming out of the driver’s seat and I could hear screaming. I think there must have been roughly half a minute between getting the first and last person out. Then another guy—who turned out to be Joel Snarr—arrived on the scene to help at just the right time. I don’t think I’d have been able to get the pilot out—he was a big guy. There is no way he would have survived if Joel hadn’t been there. I could tell straight away Joel had a military background by how he conducted himself. We’d just got all three of them to a safe distance when the aircraft was completely swallowed by the flames.

Giacomo and I stared at each other, almost laughing in relief.

The emergency services arrived pretty quickly, and we were at the scene for a couple of hours while they dealt with the fire and cleared the roads. Afterwards I spoke to the family,and that was the first time the emotion of the whole thing hit me.I kept randomly bursting into tears.

Thankfully, Stuart Moore, the pilot, and his nephew and niece Jack Moore, 19, and Billie Manley, 16, have all since made a full recovery. Jack and Billie were suffering a lot more than I was. Although they were safe, the memory of being inside that burning plane would have been more of an emotional scar.

4 . Mr. Peter Johnson, aged twenty-three, battled for half an hour to escape from his trapped car yesterday when it landed upside down in three feet of water. Mr. Johnson took the only escape route—through the boot(行李箱).

Mr. Johnson’s car had finished up in a ditch(沟渠) at Romney Marsin, Kent after skidding on ice and hitting a bank. “Fortunately, the water began to come in only slowly,” Mr. Johnson said. “I couldn’t force the doors because they were jammed against the walls of the ditch and dared not open the windows because I knew water would come flooding in.”

Mr. Johnson, a sweet salesman of Sitting Home, Kent, first tried to attract the attention of other motorists by sounding the horn and hammering on the roof and boot. Then he began his struggle to escape.

Later he said, “It was really a half penny that saved my life. It was the only coin I had in my pocket and I used it to unscrew the back seat to get into the boot. I hammered desperately with a hammer trying to make someone hear, but no help came.”

It took ten minutes to unscrew the seat, and a further five minutes to clear the sweet samples from the boot. Then Mr. Johnson found a wrench and began to work on the boot lock. Fifteen minutes passed by. “It was the only chance I had. Finally it gave, but as soon as I moved the boot lid, the water and mud poured in. I forced the lid down into the mud and scrambled clear as the car filled up.”

His hands and arms cut and bruised(擦伤), Mr. Johnson got to Beckett Farm nearby, where he was looked after by the farmer’s wife, Mrs. Lucy Bates. Huddled in a blanket, he said, “That thirty minutes seemed like hours.” Only the tips of the car wheels were visible, police said last night. The vehicle had sunk into two feet of mud at the bottom of the ditch.

5 . It was about 10:15 p.m., when Janice Esposito arrived at the Bellport train station, New York, jumped into her Honda Odyssey, and began the 20-minute drive home. She’d just returned from visiting her mother. When she turned left on Montauk Highway, out of nowhere a car T-boned her minivan, forcing her backward some 100 feet onto the railroad tracks. She sat in the minivan, bruised (挫伤) but mostly shocked.

As it happened, Pete DiPinto, a volunteer firefighter and retired teacher, 64, was getting ready for bed. When he heard the noise of metal on metal and broken glass coming from not far outside his bedroom window, he grabbed a flashlight and, still dressed in his pajamas (睡衣), ran out of the door. “Any firefighter would have done that,” he later said. “We’re always on duty.”

The first car he came upon was the one that had hit Esposito. Once concluding the driver was OK, DiPinto looked around and spotted Esposito’s minivan straddling (横跨) the railroad tracks. And then he heard the bells signaling an oncoming train.

DiPinto dashed to the minivan and struck on the driver’s side window. She just looked at him, her eyes unfocused. “I don’t know where I am,” she said. “Honey, you’re on the railroad tracks,” DiPinto shouted. “We have to get you off right now!” He pulled on the handle, but the door was jammed shut. The heavy train, traveling at 65 miles per hour, was whistling toward them. DiPinto ran to the passenger side and threw open the door. He pushed aside the deflating (放气) airbags, grabbed Esposito’s arms, and pulled her across the seat and helped her out to safety behind a signal box a few feet away. Within six seconds, the train crashed into the minivan. “It was like a Hollywood movie,” DiPinto told reporters the next day.

The Ambulance chief told CBS New York, “The hero arrived in pajamas, not in a fire truck.”

Miners have dangerous jobs because occasionally the earth sinks or falls apart. When this happens, miners are     1    (trap) underground. They are buried     2     they don't have air to breathe, food to eat, and water to drink, they will die. They     3     not go without any of these things for long, but the first is the most important.     4    is difficult to figure out where miners are and reach them in time. Trapped miners dream of     5       (be) free and don't give up.

In August 2010, 33 miners     6     (go) to work in a mine in Chile, All of a sudden, a wall broke apart and rocks and dirt filled     7     mine's exit. At first,people thought all the miners died.     8     , after working for 17 days, people at the surface learned the miners were still alive.     9    , people on the surface figured out where the miners were and dug a     10    to send them food and water.

7 . Matthew Layton was 20 minutes from home in Sevierville, Tennessee, on a cold November night in 2016 when he got a cell phone call from his mother. “The mountain’s on fire,” she screamed, “and Brian’s up there!”

Layton’s family owned a dozen rental cabins(小屋) on Shields Mountain, and Layton’s friend and fellow rental-cabin owner, Brian McGee, age 56, was up there trying to put the fire out by himself. Layton, 32, hit the gas. He lived on the mountain too.

Layton turned around and headed for a dirt road. He made it about halfway up the steep, winding path before his front-wheel-drive car gave up. He called McGee, who drove down in his pickup so they could fight the fire together.

They headed first to Layton’s rental cabins. “I wanted to make sure our guests were gone. They were,” says Layton. At that point, he had a choice: try to save his cabins or rescue people renting other cabins nearby. “On the mountain, you don’t have many locals. They’re mostly tourists who don’t know their way around,” he says.

Over the next two hours, the two friends drove through the smoky mountain, knocking on doors and leading panicked people to safety. “I know that mountain so well,” Layton says, “I could drive and know exactly where I am just by time traveled.” Thanks to their brave and immediate action, the two helped 14 people out of the danger.

Fourteen people died that night in Sevier County. But the fire didn’t take away a single life on Shields Mountain. And though his home and business were destroyed, Layton remains calm. “I wasn’t worried about my loss, not when I saw those families trapped on the mountain,” he says, “I knew I was gonna help them.”