It was a very cold morning as it had been raining very heavily the previous night. As my mother was feeling a little uncomfortable, my sister volunteered to drive me to school. I overslept and as a result, was a bit late for school. We got into the car hurriedly. The roads were already jammed with traffic. It appeared that everyone was late as well.

My sister was a careful driver and despite the fact that I was late, she refused to drive fast on the slippery road. I was lucky she was such a determined and careful person because a few hundred meters away from the school, we witnessed an accident.

It all happened in an instant, as most accidents do. A car took a left turning without signaling and a school bus crashed into it heavily. A few cars behind the school bus hit the bus as they could not stop in time and soon it became a pile-up. The car was damaged badly while the school bus also had some damage. And the already crowded road became more jammed with vehicles, which came to a mess. We wanted to help the victims. My sister drove to a stop at the roadside not too far from the accident spot.

The scene that greeted us was terrible. I first rushed to the car. The driver, a lady, lay trapped behind the wheel, unable to move. Three schoolchildren were in the back seat, their faces white with fear. Two of them were seriously hurt and bleeding from the head and hands. They were conscious although too weak and frightened to realize what had happened. We called an ambulance and while waiting, we tried as much as possible to help the victims. As a result of our joint efforts, the driver and the children were moved to safety and taken care of.

Then, I rushed to the bus filled with children’s cries.

After the ambulance had left, two policemen asked me about the accident.

5 . In 1970, Alan Ayers was participating in a skydiving team competition in Gainesville, Florida. He would be ________ out of a Cessna 172, a small four seat passenger plane. In preparation, the passenger door and front passenger seat were ________, but the passenger side seatbelt remained.

Ayers’ teammates skydived first, ________ him and the pilot as the only two people remaining in the plane. It was Ayers’ ________. But as he stepped out into the air, his foot got ________ in the passenger side seatbelt.

“I was completely out of the plane on my back, ________ at the belly (腹部) of the Cessna, with only my boot ________ to the pilot ... I tried to pull myself up to reach the buckle (锁扣), but I just couldn’t,” Ayers remembered.

Thousands of feet in the air, hanging from the plane, Ayers was out of ________.

“And what happened next was ________,” Ayers said. “The 23-year-old pilot unbuckled her seatbelt, crouched (蹲) down in the door of the airplane, with both hands off the operating handle, and ________ my ankle.”

Ayers dropped away from the plane, opened his parachute, and landed ________.

More than 50 years later, she often came into his ________. “To this day, I can see her two ________ hands reaching out of the door to unbuckle the belt,” Ayers said. “I owe my ________ to this person and will always think of her as one of the ________ people imaginable.”

6 . 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.

7 . It was rush hour on the morning of June 1 in the West Texas city of San Angelo. Heather Santellano, 36, was driving her white 2012 Mazda on Houston、 Harte Frontage Road with her nine-year-old daughter and ten-year- old son in the back. Suddenly, a red pickup truck cut them off. Santellano turned the wheel hard to the right, sending the Mazda skidding off the road and down an embankment(堤)that ended in a drop-off after about 50 feet. If the car didn't stop, it would go airborne and plunge onto the road some 20 feet below.

Then a bit of luck: As the car raced toward the edge, its undercarriage got stuck on the cement lip of the embankment ledge, stopping it cold. The occupants, however, were far from safe. The car had come to rest on top of a retaining wall, literally teetering(摇摇欲坠)on the edge of disaster. One sudden move by anyone inside could send it over.

Jacob Rodriguez watched the scene unfold from the 'T'ruck Repair Plant where he works. Then he and four other men ran to the car. They leaped onto the trunk to balance the weight as the terrified kids in the back seat watched.

Meanwhile, Julio Vasquez and his nephew, Marco Vasquez, were driving to their jabs at nearby Premier Automotive. Julio jumped out of the car to help while Marco went to the shop, grabbed a heavy-duty strap(皮带)，and returned to the swinging car. He fastened the Mazda to an P-350 truck that had been driven over by one of the other rescuers. With the car secured, the group carefully opened the back doors and helped the children out.

But their departure shifted the car's weight, causing it to lean forward. The men, still on-the trunk, asked Santellano to jump into the back seat to rebalance the weight. She did and then inched out the back door. Finally, the men carefully got off the trunk. Everyone was safe.