2 . It was late, about 10:15 p.m., when Janice Esposito arrived at the Bellport, New York, train station, jumped into her Honda Odyssey and began the 20 minute drive home to her husband and sever-year-old son. She'd just returned from visiting her mother and had traveled the route so many times. She practically drove on autopilot: a left onto Station Road, then a left on Montauk Highway, and then - wham! Out of nowhere on that awful night, a car T-boned Esposito's minivan, forcing her backward some 100 feet onto the railroad tracks. She sat in the minivan, bruised (淤伤的) but mostly just stunned by the impact and by the vehicle's airbags.

As it happens, Pete DiPinto was getting ready for bed. He'd just closed his book and was crawling under the covers when he heard the high-pitched clang of metal on metal and shattering glass coming from not far outside his bedroom window. A volunteer firefighter and retired teacher, DiPinto, 64, never stopped to think. He grabbed a flashlight and, still dressed in his pajamas, ran out of the door. The first car he came upon, 2,000 feet from his front yard, was the one that had hit Esposito. Once DiPinto concluded the driver was , he looked around and spotted Esposito's minivan straddling (横跨) the railroad tracks.

And then he heard an upsetting sound: the bells signaling an oncoming train. "Honey, you're on the railroad tracks," DiPinto shouted to Esposito, "We have to get you off right now!" He yanked on the handle, but the door was smashed in and jammed shut. The heavy diesel (柴油) train, traveling at 65 miles per hour, was hurting toward them. Dipinto ran to the passenger side and threw open the door. He pushed aside the flat airbags, grabbed Esposico's arms, and pulled her toward him across the passenger seat until he could help her out and rapidly walk her to safety behind a signal box a few feet away. Within six seconds, he estimates, the train ploughed into the minivan.

3 . For me personally, I could write for days about many different situations where adversity(逆境) _______my life. Now let me tell you one experience where I almost let adversity_________

We had a glass studio, which was located 50 feet from our home. A couple of years ago we experienced an_______winter, we had a lot of snow and ice. The _______ of the ice and snow _______ the roof on our studio, taking with it one of our sources of income. _______it did fall down, we got on the roof and tried to remove the snow and ice, but when you have 5 feet of ice and temperatures of minus 20 Celsius, it was pretty _______ to do

We had a partner come in to help us try to _______ the roof by supporting. In the end, there was nothing that could be done. The roof came down.We had moved a lot of our goods and tools from the studio but we lost a lot also: glass, kilns, workbenches, to name only a few of the items. It was a disastrous experience.

Here we were in the middle of winter with our studio collapsed. We couldn’t work as we had almost _______ all the material in a building we were not using. We could have done one of two things: we could simply say that we can no longer   ________ our glass business. Let me tell you that this was certainly a thought that________ our mind. Or we could find a way to get our studio back up and running.

We picked the ________ option. We had a large ban that we were not using. So we renovated(翻新)the barn, ________ our working area and today we have a nicer studio than we ________ had. If the adversity we were ________ had not happened, we probably would still be working in the old studio-a studio that was less efficient.

8 . LAS VEGAS—It was different in the light of day.

There was no “pop, pop, pop” of gunfire, no screams. Just a quiet lot of cars abandoned by those, like Kassidy Owen, who escaped with their lives.

“It's strange to hear the silence” Owen said, “because all I remember was the noise”

The 22-year-old was one of dozens of concertgoers who returned to the scene of the Route 91 Harvest festival on Wednesday morning to fetch the vehicles they left behind as they fled from a gunman raining down bullets from high above in the tower of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino across the street.

Survivors of the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday needed their cars to move on with their lives-to get back to work, to school, home. It was the first time they were returning to a scene that would forever change them, when joy and celebration and music turned into killing and horror.

Before they could move forward, they had to go back to the place where they thought they were going to die.

Owen had run to her car to hide and had tried to drive away, but she couldn't. People were running, bodies dropped to the ground, and cars bottlenecked in the parking lot. During a brief pause after more than 10 minutes of gunfire, she worried the lights of her SUV made everyone inside a shining target.

“They're shooting again” her best friend's brother screamed. “Turn off the car!”

That's when she got out and fled.

“I just remember shutting the door and running.” Owen said.

Now, nearly three days later, she was back, sitting in the driver's seat of her SUV. Her eyes were swollen and red. This was a long way from over.

“You just keep hearing the gunshots in your head,” Owen said.