When asked about why she chose to be a cadet (学员) firefighter, Ava Smith talked about her father’s action four months ago. “The girl he saved is going to live a whole life because of him. It’s incredible!” she said.
Jonathan Smith, and his 13-year-old daughter, Ava, were driving on the 1.4-mile-long, two-lane Route 90 bridge, which spans (横跨) the shallow waters of Assawoman Bay.
Suddenly, the calm was disturbed by the scream of tyres.
Not far ahead of them, a black pickup truck (小卡车) was sliding from one lane to the other. It crashed into a barrier, turned around like endless, and came to rest hanging over the edge of the bridge. Smith hit the brakes in time to avoid the vehicles in his path, but too late: he ran into a BMW directly ahead of him.
Smith stopped the car. “Ava, are you OK?” he asked. She was obviously shocked, but unhurt.
He ran to the BMW. “Are you OK?” he asked the driver. She nodded, too terrified to speak.
And then another scream came from the pickup. The truck bed hung out past the railing (栏杆), about 10 meters above the waters of the bay. The driver’s door was pushed open and a man climbed out. He dropped to the ground, then ran to the railing. The man pointed down, saying something in Spanish to Smith. In the water was a car seat. Next to it was a girl, about two years old: pink dress, brown hair, brown eyes, floating on her back, kicking and shouting.
Matters quickly went from bad to frightening when the baby girl rolled over onto her stomach. Smith waited for the pickup driver to do something, but he didn’t. Maybe he was in shock.
注意：
1. 续写词数应为150左右：
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
“Ava!” Smith yelled, removing his shoes. “Stay by the car!”
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Standing, he laid her against his shoulder and beat her back hard.
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Pam Bales planned a six-hour hike through New Hampshire^ Mount. On the dashboard （汽车仪表板） was a detailed plan ensuring she could return before the arrival of some forecasted bad weather. Different from former hike, though, this time, she had packed for almost every accident and intended to walk alone.
At about 8 a.m., she'd checked the weather forecast. Bales knew from experience that her hike was realistic. Besides, she had two emergency plans and extra layers of clothing to better protect her core temperature as conditions changed.
Bales felt excited as she walked up into snowy paths. She was wearing a fleece tank top （绒衣）and hiking pants, and no gloves or hat because the air was mild. Thirty minutes later, she climbed into colder air and deeper snows. She now was in a quarter-zip fleece top and gloves. At 10 a.m.? the weather was showing its teeth. Bales added more layers to resist cold winds and dense fog. Making her way across the snow-covered ridge, she noticed something: a single set of footprints made by a pair of sneakers. Not giving them much thought, she walked on.
By 11 a.m.? Bales was getting cold. She decided to return to her car. On her way down, she again spotted the sneaker tracks, which suddenly made a hard left-hand turn off the trail. Now she felt genuinely alarmed. She was sure the hiker lost his way in the low visibility. If Bales continued to follow the tracks, she'd add risk and time to her return. But she couldn't let this go. She turned to the left and called out, “Hello!" Nothing.
Bales followed the tracks, rounded a slight comer and saw a man sitting motionless. He wore tennis sneakers, shorts, a light jacket and fingerless gloves. His skin was pale and he had a glazed （呆滞的）look on his face. uOh5 hello/5 Bales approached and said, "What's your name?” The man didn't react. Obviously, nothing was connecting for him and he was in really big trouble.
注意：
1.续写词数应为150左右；
2 .请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Bales stopped being a curious and concerned hiker, and began a full-on rescue mission.
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Over the next hour, the man began to move and speak.
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With the late afternoon sun setting on his farm, Steve finished feeding his horses and decided to go home. His two sons, Danny, 6, and Claus, 3, followed behind.
As they headed for the house, the two boys ran ahead of their father, who stopped to close the gate. Danny paused at an old well. Unknown to him, the board covering the well had grown easily broken over time. When Danny stepped on it, it caved in. Steve had just finished locking the gate when he turned around and saw only his younger son.
“Where’s Danny?” he shouted. “He fell in the hole!” Claus said. Steve quickly realized what had happened. Danny could barely swim! He ran to the well and heard Danny screaming quite way below. Desperately, he jumped in .
Steve hit the freezing water at the bottom of the well. He lifted his head out of the water and grabbed Danny, who was panicked, trying to stay afloat in water that was too deep for either of them to stand.
Knowing they could float in the ice-cold water for only a short time, Steve pulled his son up onto his chest and tried all means to stand upright with two legs against the narrow well walls for support. His body was still partly submerged (淹没). “Dad, you can pull us out now,” Danny said.
If only it were that easy. There was no way he could climb out. Looking up to see Claus looking down at them from the top of the well, Steve shouted, “Claus, you’re going to have to be a big boy and save us. You have to go out to the road and get someone to help. OK?” “OK, Daddy.” Claus yelled and ran to the road.
注意：
1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
About 15 minutes later, Edmen and Sam, their neighbors, were driving by Steve’s farm when they noticed Claus alone by the side of the road, waving.
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Forty-some minutes after he’d jumped into the well to save his son, Steve came out, cold and wet.
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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.
注意：
1. 所续写短文的词数应为150左右；
2. 续写部分分为两段，每段开头语已为你写好；
Paragraph 1:
It took 30 minutes to get back upstream to the beach where they’d had lunch.
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Paragraph 2:
The next morning, the helicopter returned.
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It was a bright May afternoon along the Maryland coast, and Jonathan Bauer, 51, an expert doctor at a hospital, and his 13-year-old daughter, Ava were were driving with the windows down as they headed home on the 1.4-mile-long, two-lane Route 90 bridge, which stretches across the shallow waters of Assa-woman Bay. Suddenly, the calm was disturbed by the squeal of tires.
Not far ahead of them, a black pickup truck was sliding from one lane to the other. To the Bauers’ horror, it ran into a concrete barrier, turned over the SUV directly ahead of them, and came to rest hanging over the railing (栏杆) of the bridge. Bauer hit the brakes in time to avoid the vehicles in his path.
“Ava, are you OK?” he asked after stopping the car. She was shaken, but otherwise unhurt. And then a scream. It came from the pickup, which had come to rest on its right side. The back passenger compartment (车厢) and truck bed hung out past the guardrail, 30 or more feet above the waters of the bay. The driver’s door threw open and a man climbed out. He dropped to the ground, and then ran to the railing. Bauer ran up beside him. The man pointed down, saying something in Spanish. In the water was a car seat. Bobbing (颠簸) next to it was a girl, about two years old, pink dotted dress, brown hair, brown eyes, terrified, floating on her back, kicking and splashing and screaming.
From around the truck, more screaming came from its other passengers who had gotten off the truck and were looking down into the water.
The situation quickly went from bad to frightening when the baby girl rolled over onto her stomach. Bauer waited for the pickup driver to do something, but he didn’t move. Maybe he was in shock. “Ava!” Bauer shouted, bending to remove his shoes. “Stay by the car!”
注意：1. 续写次数为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题纸的相应位置作答。
Paragraph 1:
He climbed onto the railing and jumped into the water without hesitation.
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Paragraph 2:
Her eyes opened now, focused on him, and he could hear ambulance coming this way. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Milo is a rescue dog, adopted by 20-year-old Makayla Swift. But Milo the beagle is also a rescuer. One morning in November 2021, Swift opened her front door in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Milo took off running. Milo ran to the house across the street. He seemed unsatisfied with this house, so he ran to the one next door, Swift on his tail. He started scratching on the front door and Swift was thinking, “Why is he literally trying to break into her house?” She was embarrassed. Not everyone wants a strange dog on their property. But as she tried to drag Milo away, she could hear a sound coming through an open upstairs window. It was a voice yelling “Help!”
Hours earlier, around 4 a.m., 85-year-old Sherry Starr had risen from her bed. All of a sudden, standing there between the toilet and the tub, she slipped. She went down-hard-on the tile floor, and got stuck. Starr was scared of dying there. Her best bet, she decided, was to listen for the letter carrier in the afternoon and scream like the devils.
注意：1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
For the next few hours, Starr practiced yelling, “Help! Help! Help!”
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Not long after the call, rescue workers arrived.
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I worked at a local station of the Berlin fire department. We got an alert (警报) around 8:25pm that Friday and rushed to the fire engine, where the printout from the dispatcher (调度员) said there was a nine-year-old boy locked in a safe.
I asked myself: if it were a safe, would it be airtight? I was aware that it might already be too late by the time we arrived. I had to plan for a bad outcome. On the other hand, if we were in time, how long would it take us to open the safe? I knew it would be an incredibly difficult task. It’s what safes are designed for—not to be opened.
It took less than five minutes to reach the property. When I saw a woman crying on the street,
I knew the situation was serious. She was the boy’s mother and she led us into the basement. She told us the boy was alive and we started talking to him; he was very calm. We asked how it had happened: during a game of hide and seek with his five-year-old brother, he had thought the safe would be a good place to hide.
The boy’s parents had got the house from his mother’s father. The unlocked safe had been there when they moved in and was in an area they didn’t use much. The boy’s little brother had shut the safe, then, when he couldn’t open it again. The only person who knew the combination was the boy’s late grandfather.
From the outset, the biggest priority was getting oxygen to the boy. We got oxygen from the hospital. The boy said that he could feel a thin stream of air. I asked his parents if anyone had opened the safe before and they said no. So we had to guess a six-digit code (密码). We started typing them in—but we had to wait 10 minutes between each attempt before we could try again. So quickly we tried them all. No luck.
注意：
1.续写词数应为150左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卷的相应位置作答。
We were fully prepared at this point to open the safe by force, starting with a drill.
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Then, just as we started to make the first cut, my workmate typed in the correct code.
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It was just past midnight. The stars were shining across the sky. Nicholas Bostic, a 38-year-old driver, was still out on his evening pizza delivery shift. With his favorite music on, he enjoyed the soft wind kissing his face. A she drove pasta two-story house around a street corner, he was shocked at the frightening sight: It was on fire! He stopped his car and rushed over to assess the situation and to determine if anyone might be trapped inside. He reached for his phone to dial 911, but realized he left it at home. He didn’t hear sirens(警报) in the distance. Nor did he see any bystanders dialing the fire department. Nicholas feared the home’s sleeping occupants might not wakeup in time to move to safety.
With no time to waste, he made the courageous decision to enter the home on his own without protective gear(护具). He gained entry through the back door. He rushed upstairs, yelling “fire!” throughout the home. The oldest child, Seionna, heard his screams and woke up. She woke up her younger sister and a friend who had stayed the night. She then ran to grab her 1-year-old baby sister.
Nicholas called out to the terrified girls and instructed them to follow him. The sister—Seionna, 18; Shaylee, 13; and Kalia, 1―and their family friend, Livian, 13, followed his directions to escape to the safety of the street.
“For a minute I didn’t understand it,” Shaylee recalled. “But my sister ran upstairs with the baby in her hands, yelling at us to get up because there’s a fire. That’s when we went downstairs, and Nicolas was downstairs helping us.”
Once outside in the fresh air, the girls shook in far and coughed from the smoke. However, they soon realized that their 6-year-old sister, Kaylani, had not escaped with them.
注意：1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Without hesitation, Nicholas rushed back into the now flame-filled home.
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As flames shot at his feet, he broke the window’s glass with his bare hand.
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The waves crashed heavily against the rocks, the stormy sea swallowing the once-powerful ship. The only survivor of the shipwreck was brought by the currents to the shore of a small, uninhabited island. His desperate cries for help mixed with the roar of the storm, only to be swallowed by the ocean.
Exhausted and disoriented, he lay on the sandy beach, thanking whatever forces had saved his life. After he surveyed the surroundings, he realized the harsh reality of his isolation. He prayed to God and scanned the horizon for any sign of rescue, but no help appeared. In the midst of despair, he gradually awakened to the fact that he had to survive on this uninhabited island on his own. Driven by great determination, the survivor managed to build a shelter with the driftwood to protect him from the elements, and to store his few possessions.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months. The survivor, once stuck in his isolation, started exploring the island’s hidden treasures. His routine became a dull cycle of hunting for food, collecting rainwater, and scanning the horizon for any sign of rescue. But the vast expanse of the ocean offered no comfort, no ship on the horizon to save him.
Despite his loneliness, the survivor clung to hope. The sunrises brought a glimmer of optimism, and he kept scanning the horizon, searching for any trace of rescue.
Then, one fateful day, as he returned from a fruitless search for food, he was greeted by a devastating sight — his shelter was on fire, and the smoke was rolling up to the sky! The worst had happened — the fire had consumed all his possessions, leaving him nothing but the clothes on his back. Desperation and disbelief seized him as he watched the smoke rise to the sky, a cruel demonstration of his misfortune.
注意： 1.续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在相应位置作答。
“God, how could you do this to me!” he cried.
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The rescuers explained that they had seen the smoke signal from the burning shelter.
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In the summer of 2002, Linda was about to enter sixth grade after having recently moved. Being new to town, her mother decided to sign her up for Girl Scouts(女童子军). The benefits of the Girl Scouts were well-known:developing leadership skills, creating a strong sense of self, encouraging healthy relationships among others. One of the most important parts of the program involved developing healthy relationships, often leading to unbreakable bonds, sometimes through the Buddy(伙伴) Program.
Soon Linda joined Pisgah Girl Scout Camp in Brevard, North Carolina, where she was paired with a buddy named Rose in a four-person tent. At camp, Linda and Rose's lives were closely connected together. As a Girl Scout, Linda was taught to have someone to rely on, to know where she is going, to talk over things, and to make friends. Little did she know how important that single skill would be in her life.
One afternoon, a storm blew in and sent the girls all to their tents. Lightning(闪电) struck a tree outside the girls' tent. As bad luck would have it, Linda had been standing on her metal bed at the time. Lightning traveled from the metal clothesline between that tree and another one-burning all the bathing suits-went down into the tree roots, which were tied up into the floorboards of the tents, and hit her bed. Very soon, two-thirds of Linda's body was burned. Linda was lying on the floor badly burned and unable to move.
The other three girls in the tent were frightened to death. They screamed and ran from the tent, not noticing what was happening to Linda, but Rose quickly realized her buddy was not among them.
注意：1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Without a second thought, Rose went back to look for Linda, only to find her on the floor of the tent.
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They finally got back in touch, and together, they toured the camp where they had got to know each other.
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