Mary was seven years old. Her parents recently moved to a new town, and so Mary was going to a       school, which was a few kilometers from the house they lived in now. A school bus going around picked up        every morning and brought them back to their      every afternoon, and as both of Mary’s parents        to go to work, she always went on this bus.
Mary’s parents always      their alarm clock for seven o’clock so that none of them would be        . But one morning the alarm      to go off, and it was not until a quarter past eight that Mary’s mother suddenly      , looked at the clock and said, “What’s ever happened to that clock?” and then        into Mary’s room to wake her up.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said, “       you’ll have to wash and dress very quickly, have an even      break-fast and then I’ll         you to school on my way to the office.”
“But how can you find the      , Mum?” Mary said, “You’ve been to school only once.”
“Yes,” her mother answered, “but you’ve done the        several times now on the bus, so you can be my guide to get there, can’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mary, “I suppose so.” She washed, and        and had a quick breakfast, and then they set off. Mary told her mother to turn each time they came to a place she         . In this way she made her mother drive round most of the town       they got to her school. When they arrived, her mother saw that it was not really very far from her house.
“Why ever did you make me go such a long way round, Mary, instead of the most          way?” her mother asked her.
“Well, Mum,” answered Mary, “it was because I didn’t know       else to get here. That’s the way our bus always goes to        the other children to school.

When I walk through the streets of San Francisco’s business districts, white people stare at me as if I were a circus clown.
Their staring eyes don’t see that I get ________ A’s in school, or that I am a captain of the football team, or that I belong to ______youth organizations. All they see is that I am 6-foot-4, young, black, and male---a potential _______to them.
White men look at me as if I am up to no good, or as if they are ________to me. White women just look at me with________, say, sometimes they cross the street when they see my friends and me coming, or walk in the street and only get back on the sidewalk after we ________.
Many people come to San Francisco to get away from the stereotypes(成見) of the cities they were born and ________ in. The majority of the blacks and Latinos who live in this city don’t have that luxury.
How can you feel at home when people are__________telling you to get back to Africa or Mexico ----or just back to “where you belong”?
My way of dealing with this kind of thing has ________over the years. In the past, when my friends and I would walk the streets and a hundred pairs of white eyes would look at me as if we were the lowest form of dirt, it would make us angry enough to hurt or _______them.
Now I’m more likely to use ________ to defend myself against those eyes. To women who clutch their purse in terror, I’ll say, “Man, I ain’t gonna do anything to you, I got money in my pocket!” My cousin has even started wearing a T-shirt _______ in big letters, “NO, WHITE LADY, I DON'T’ WANT YOUR PURSE.”
The most painful thing is when we get those______ stares from black people, especially elderly ones. I want o say to them, “We’re black, too. Why would we do something to you?”
Usually I react more _______to all of this than a lot of my friends do. Some of them, so brainwashed, just think it’s part of life and that there is nothing you can do.
But for me, that’s not good enough. I just can’t stand it when every day a hundred pair of eyes tell you you’re not__________.

Once upon a time there lived an old man in a nice cottage with a large garden. The old man was seen      his flowers all the time. They were so well-tended that every passer-by could not but       for a glance.
One day a young man went by the garden. He gazed at the splendid garden,      in admiration at the beauty of these sceneries. Then, suddenly he      the old gardener was blind.     , the young man asked, “Why are you busy tending these flowers every day which you can’t      in fact?” The old man smiled and answered that “ I can tell you           reasons. First I was a            when I was young, and I really like this job. Second, although I can’t see these flowers, yet I can       them. Third，I can smell sweetness of them. As to the last one, that’s     .
“Me? But you don’t know me,” responded the young man      .
“Yeah, it’s             that I don’t know you. But I know everyone knows flowers and would never      them down. I know the beauty of my garden will get many people into a good      . In the meantime, it also      a chance to me to have a word with you here and to enjoy the happiness these flowers have brought us.”
The old man’s      astonished me. The blind man grows flowers and   them as a link of minds so as to make      enjoy the sunshine in spring. Isn’t it one kind of happiness？
I believe every flower has     with which they can see the kindness of the man’s heart. The blind man grows flowers in his heart. Though     to see the beauty of blossoming, he surely can hear the voice of it, I suppose.

In the United States there was an unusual story telling of the daughter of an engineer. One day       walking along the bank of a lake, the girl happened to see 20 eggs laid by a wild goose(鵝). After some time the girl       the mother would not return to the eggs and she     to take them home. There she carefully       the eggs in the heat of a lamp. Several days       , the eggs broke and the baby geese came into the       .
Geese are known to take the first living thing         theysee as their mother. Thus, to these      geese, the girl was their mother.
As they grew, the girl was able to        her birds to run across the grass, but she could not teach them to       . The litter girl became increasingly worried about this, both when     and in her dreams. Suddenly, she thought       a clever idea: she would fly a plane to guide them in        . She asked her father for a plane and he made a small one for her. Caring about     safety, the father flew the plane himself. However, the birds didn’t       him. They all slept in the grass       .
The girl was so worried about it that one day the girl       into the plane and started it. Soon the plane left the       . Seeing their mother in the air, the birds     expanded their wings and        . She flew the plane freely in the sky, with her young birds following.

My wife and I moved into our home two years ago. We had a yard with a lot of     ．Very often when we have flowers, Denise or I would plant some between the rocks, just to add some       to the area．
Last summer, I found a tiny little      in the yard that I could not immediately identify. I knew I didn’t plant it and Denise said she didn’t either. We decided to let it       growing until we could find out what it was.
Weeks passed and as I made my way back to the      plant, it appeared to be a sunflower. I decided to     the weeds around it. As I pulled rocks from the area to get to the weeds, I noticed something      . The sunflower had not       where I saw it begin. It actually had begun under a big      and grown under and around it to reach the     ．
That’s when I      that if a tiny little sunflower didn’t let a big rock stand in its      of developing, we too have the ability of doing the same thing. If we      ourselves like that little sunflower, we can reach where we      to go and get what we need for growth．
We need to believe in ourselves knowing we have the      to achieve our goals. Like the     , it knew it had the ability to get over the rocks because it had      in itself that it would succeed. Stand tall like the sunflower and be      who and what we are, then the environment will begin to      us. We will find a way to go under or      any “rocks”in order to reach our goals．

My parents had always prepared for hurricanes. It is what      people do in Florida because “you never know”. For us, that     a white metal cabinet (儲藏柜) in our utility room (雜用間) filled with cans of food. We could      eat anything out of the cabinet because “you never know” when a hurricane will come.
As a kid, I was      about the white cabinet. I thought it was kind of strange to have food in the utility room. But, one look from my mother      me from opening the door to glance inside.
One year, Channel 4 reported that Hurricane Dora was      for the northern part of Florida. Soon the storm got      and the wind blew. Then, the tall pine trees started to sway. And,      “sway”, I meant “ fall over or crash down on anything in their way”. We were lucky, as the       went other directions and didn’t take our power out.
However, when my mother started cooking, the power was out.      I calculated it was time to crack open that white cabinet. But, Dad thought it was time to      up the charcoal grill（燒烤架 ） outside where it was raining and windy. To this day, I never      a man’s love for his grill.
Our power came back for a while. So, my mother began cooking everything she could and       it away, to the neighbors, to friends without power, to anyone with      . I was hoping that the fried chicken was going to find its way to our     . But, it didn’t. And, just as the last of the food was sent out and she began to work on our dinner, yes, we lost our     . It was time for 20 minutes’ eggs on the grill.
Oh, the white metal cabinet. No. We never     it. We weren’t “that bad off” as I understand it. And, for years I      how bad off we would have to be to eat out of that cabinet. Perhaps it was just the      of it, the thought that it was there watching our backs      we wanted a can of beans or some potted meat. I don’t know if that was what was in there. Anyway, I never looked inside.

When my husband and I got married, he worked as a mechanic (機修工) from midnight to 8 a．m. However, I worked during the __  . So as he came home from work each morning, I was getting ready to _ _.
We had very little __  then, so when Valentine's Day came around that first year, I knew we couldn't ___  _ anything for each other. After he left to go to work the night before Valentine's Day, I decided to ___  _ and make a Valentine's Day card for him. I ___   wrote a poem on the front of the card. When he came home the next __  _， I felt foolish as I handed him the card, ___  _ that he wouldn't laugh at it. When he had finished ___  _ it, he slowly raised his head and looked at me. Then he reached down into his pocket. When he pulled his ___  _ out, he was holding __  .
He told me that he had _32_ it for me during his lunch hour, but he had been ___  _ to give it to me because he thought I might think it was ___  _， and that I might laugh at it.
It was a small heart made out of aluminum (鋁).  ___  _ I had stayed up all night making him a valentine card, he had been cutting out a __  _ for me. I still have the aluminum heart, and I ___   it in my desk. Every time I see it, all those ___   _ come flooding back to me. Over the years, we've been able to buy each other very nice, __   presents for Valentine's Day. But none has ever been as dear or ___  _ as much as those handmade gifts made from our hearts the first year that we were married.

Ten years ago, my family moved to a new city, therefore I studied in the new primary school.. Sometimes, I felt very unhappy and lonely. Then one of my classmates invited me to her house for a dinner       . I was a little anxious, but finally I gladly     .
Not really knowing how     the bus ride should be, I      when I saw the landmarks     on my friend’s hand-drawn map. But when I got close enough to the     , I found none of the streets were shown on the map. I was       on a busy road with cars driving past without a person in sight. I had no     when the next bus would come,      when a bus did come by, I         got on. I told the bus driver where I wanted to go and he said that I had caught the      bus, but he let me stay on. After he had finished his scheduled bus route, he     to help me out. I gratefully showed him my little hand-drawn map but         did not help much.
He finally        me off at a main road to catch a different bus and was    that he could not help me more. After a few minutes of walking, I noticed a bus pull up beside me. It was the      bus driver. He explained that he didn’t want to leave me there       . He sent out a call and someone radioed back, saying that the bus I needed to catch was about ten minutes away. At last I made it to the dinner party       I was over an hour late.
I am forever thankful for the      that this bus driver had for me. His act of kindness left a     on my heart.

Flood damage cleanup is an unforgettable experience for me. I have seen a number of news reports on television showing houses that have been      by natural flooding and how the different            there are coping and starting their flood damage cleanup. I have always felt      for the families that have become victims of flooding however I couldn’t imagine what they were      because I have never experienced flooding or flood damage cleanup at first      until two years back.
My      experience happened when I woke up early one morning because of the     of water. As I started to get out of bed to turn on the light, I felt cold muddy water at my     . I then realized that the power was     . This probably happened due to the heavy      and strong wind that were brought by a hurricane during the     .
As the rains stopped, I decided to do my flood damage cleanup     . Because I had only moved in the house and had only      a few belongings, the amount of damage was     . It involved only washing shoes and bags      soap and water.
It was a good thing that most of my things were      inside plastic buckets and most of the furniture that I bought was made of      and plastic. This made my flood damage cleanup a lot easier. My cleanup work only      the removal of mud from the apartment floors. It was  also a good thing that the      had hardwood floors. Had the apartment been covered with carpet, I would have had to      a lot having the carpet cleaned if not replaced with a new one.

Every morning at eleven, a bright new car drove through the central park in New York．Inside the car    a driver and his boss, a well-known millionaire（百萬富翁）.
Each morning the millionaire       a poorly-dressed man     on a park bench(長凳)．The man always sat     staring at the hotel in which the rich man lived．One day the millionaire was so    in the man that he asked his driver to stop the car and he   to the bench．He said to the poor man, “Excuse me,      I just have to know why you sit staring at my hotel every morning.” “Sir, ”said the poor man, “I’m a failure．I have no job, no family and no    ．I sleep on this bench and every night I dream that     day I will sleep in this hotel.” The rich man had  ．He said to the poor man, “Tonight your dream will come  . I’ll     for the best room in that hotel for you for      .” The millionaire smiled and felt     of himself.
A few days      , the millionaire went by the poor man’s room to ask him how he      himself．To his great     , he found that the poor man had moved out of the hotel, back to his park bench．When the millionaire asked why, the man said, “You see, when I’m     here sleeping on the bench．I always dream I’m up there in the hotel．It’s a wonderful dream．But when I was up there in the hotel, I dreamed I was    here on this cold bench．It was     dream and I could not get any sleep at all.”