1 . Some literary characters capture the imagination of readers. Their adventures, experiences, talents and personalities make them _______. Detective Sherlock Holmes is one of these. Author Arthur Conan Doyle created Holmes in 1887 in his works. He was brilliant. Critically, his ability to notice _______, assemble them and draw conclusions amazed everyone. He first appeared in the story “A Study in Scarlet”The story also introduced Dr. John Watson and how he came to live with Holmes and be part of his life. Watson observes that many interesting people visit Holmes at various times during the day. Holmes informs Watson he is a “_______detective”. These people are clients, including _______ from Scotland Yard, who seek his help to solve difficult cases.

Watson narrates this first case which involves the murders of two men. The story has two parts. In the first part, Holmes solves the crime and captures the killer. The second part gives the backstory as to why the killer murdered his _______. It was a revenge (报复) killing for their part in the death of the murderer’s fiancee.

The Red-headed League is on many people’s lists of their favorite stories _______ Sherlock Holmes. In this story, red-headed businessman Jabez Wilson wants Holmes’ help. Several weeks before, Wilson’s young assistant, Vincent Spaulding, had _______ him to reply to a newspaper ad. The ad offered _______ paid work to a red-headed man. Wilson gets the job and is paid 4 pounds a week for short periods of afternoon work. _______ suddenly without notice the job stops. Wilson wants Holmes’s assistance to discover what happened. Holmes ________ a description of Spaulding and goes to see him at Wilson’s shop. He notices that the knees of Spaulding’s trousers are ________. Then Holmes taps on the pavement ________Wilson’s shop. Next he calls a police inspector and the director of the bank that is behind Wilson’s shop. The four men hide in the dark bank vault (金库) and wait. Soon two men, one of whom is Spaulding, ________ from a tunnel cut into the vault’s floor and are captured. The two men had ________ the Red-headed League to keep Wilson away while they dug the ________ to the bank vault.

2 . We could not go for a walk that _______. There was such a freezing cold wind, and such heavy rain, that we all stayed indoors. I was glad of it. I _______ liked long walks, especially in winter. I used to hate coming home when it was almost dark, with ice-cold fingers and toes, feeling miserable because Bessie, the nursemaid, was always scolding me. All the time I knew I was different from my cousins, Eliza, John and Georgiana Reed. They were taller and stronger than me, and they were _______.   

These___________usually spent their time crying and quarrelling, but today they were sitting _______ around their mother in the sitting-room. I wanted to join the family circle, but Mrs Reed, my aunt, refused. Bessie had complainted about me.   

“No, I’m sorry, Jane. _________ I hear from Bessie, or see for myself, that you are really trying to behave better, you cannot be treated as a good, happy child, like my children.” “What does Bessie say I have done?” I asked.   

“Jane, it is not polite to___________me in that way. If you cannot speak pleasantly, be quiet.”

I_________ out of the sitting-room and into the small room next door, _______ I chose a book full of pictures from the bookcase. I ________ to the window-seat and drew the________, so that I was completely hidden. I sat there for a while. Sometimes I looked out of the window at the grey November afternoon, and saw the rain pouring down on the leafless garden. But most of the time I studied the book and stared, fascinated, at the pictures. Lost in the world of imagination, I forgot my sad, lonely existence for a while, and was happy, I was only afraid that my secret hiding-place might be discovered.

________ the door of the room opened. John Reed rushed in.

“Where are you, rat?” he shouted. He did not see me behind the curtain. “Eliza! Georgy! Jane isn’t here! Tell Mamma she’s run out into the rain—what a bad________ she is!”

“How ________I drew the curtain,” I thought. He would never have found me, because he was not very intelligent. But Eliza guessed ________ where I was. “She’s in the window-seat, John,” she called from the sitting-room. So I came out immediately, as I did not want him to pull me out.

3 . Fait Diver: More Than Brief Stories

Every day, there are items in the news believed too minor to report at length. For these _________ stories, French newspapers of old had a solution: a section called fait divers: stories of a paragraph or a few   lines. These brief   stories were   typically   of some_________ or odd   occurrence: train accidents, lovers' quarrels, drownings, suicides. The fait divers remained a practical form, intended to convey a   story without _________ too much space, but it also developed into an art. In   French literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture and influenced the writing of _________ as varied as Stendha（司汤达）, Flauber（福楼拜）,     and Camus（加缪）, sometimes as the_________ inspiration for what later became a novel. _________ a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English press as a literary form.

Perhaps the finest flowering of fait divers was in the reports filed by the art critic Felix Feneon 1906. He gave the   form more wit, more emotional _________ and formal perfection, than it     had had before. In his hands, it became ironic, dark, and very funny. His collected fait divers, published in English as Novels in Three Lines, was a(n) _________ to me. It inspired me to undertake _________ projects. One was a sequence of fait divers set in contemporary Nigeria and__________ from   the newspapers there. The other was based on stories from New York City's newspapers in 1912: the New-York Tribune, the New York Herald, the New York Times. I called my projects small fates."   an   acknowledgment   that   so   many   of   these   stories   are __________ about   the   strange   workings of chance.

One   can go days in New York   without really thinking about how __________ these   streets once were by crowds of people, all of whom are now dead. I found in writing the small fates that these long-gone New Yorkers suddenly came back to the__________ tense when you are not even ready for   it. The fine   details made   their lives vivid and __________. They were no longer__________, and at times seemed even more real to me than the latter-day outside my window.

4 . When my mother told me stories about Emily, her grandmother, who she admired, I was all ears. My mother drew a _______ between Emily and Jacqueline Kennedy, former US president’s wife. Mom described her _______ features: a long graceful neck and a tiny waist. “Emily was just like Jacqueline,” Mom said. “But their origins wouldn’t _______: Emily was graceful, soft-spoken, but possibly born a slave.”

Emily attracted me. Not until 2005 did my research on ancestry really start to _______ , for the reason that I was no longer _______. “When does your new job start?” asked my mother. “I refuse to take a job for at least a year,” I replied. My mother had no _______ with such words. “Anyway, you should have a job.” I remained _______ and didn’t explain it. But I felt I must _______ my job to collect more stories about my _______.

I ________ my mother’s line to a place called Cane River. I found the bill of shameful slave sale for my great-great-great grandmother, who was ________ in 1850 for $ 800. I had to write the stories. This time the novel Cane River was sold in a（n） ________ way.

One day, the phone rang, “Hello, this is Oprah Winfrey, the talk show hostess.” I couldn’t believe my ears. I responded in ________, “Hello, Ms Winfrey. What can I do for you today?” She told me she selected my novel for her book club, which ________ led to Cane River on The New York Times bestseller list and a ________ readership than I expected.