“A new student is waiting in your room.” My principal announced. “Name’s Mary. I’ll talk to you about her.” I nodded, some materials in my hands. “Fine,” I said. “We’re making valentine envelopes, a good way for her to get ________.”

She sat in the back of the room, her hands ________ in her lap. “Welcome, Mary. I’m glad you are in our room.” No ________. “Mary.” I said again. She raised her head and looked into my eyes. A chill went through me. The eyes in that face were unexpectedly ________ as if the owner of a house had drawn the blinds (百叶窗).

The bell rang, little time to worry about Mary. After ________ Mary into her desk, I distributed materials and then hurried to the office. There I learned weeks ago, someone had broken into her home, killing her mother in Mary’s ________. She survived but had been ________ since. “Give her ________,” the principal suggested.

I returned and grabbed a chance to explain this to my students. “It may be a long time ________ she joins us, but you can do your bit.” How loving they could be once they understood. On Valentine’s Day, Mary’s envelopes overflowed. Although studying each card without ________, she replaced it in her container.

Later on a March day, my children noticed the flowers ________ and advised making flower baskets! It was something to lift our ________. Remembering the valentine incident, I expected nothing from Mary; ________, I encouraged her to try. Soon, a boy exclaimed: “Look at Mary’s basket. So pretty!” I was dumbfounded at its beauty, asking how she managed it. She looked at me with the shining eyes of any ________ girl and replied “Mother loved flowers.”

“God, you’ve given us a ________.” I put my arms around Mary. I’ve kept the followers in my desk just to remind me of the lasting power of love.

British Cycling had recently hired Dave Brailsford as its new director. At the time, professional cyclists in Great Britain had ________ nearly one hundred years of mediocrity(平庸). In fact, their________   had been so poor that one of the top bike companies in Europe ________ to sell bikes to the team because they were afraid that it would hurt sales if other professionals saw the British people using their bikes.

What made Brailsford different from previous coaches was his________ of searching for a tiny improvement in everything they do. The whole principle came from the idea that if you________   everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, improve it by 1 percent and you will get a________ increase when you put them all together.

Brailsford and his coaches began by making small________. They redesigned the bike seats to make them more________. They asked riders to wear electrically heated over-shorts to ________ ideal muscle temperature while riding and used biofeedback sensors to ________how each athlete responded to a particular workout.

But they didn’t stop there.They________ to find 1 percent improvements in overlooked areas. They hired a(n)________ to teach each rider the best way to wash their hands to reduce the ________ of catching a cold. They even painted the ________ of the team truck white, which helped them ________little bits of dust that would normally slip by ________ but could affect the performance of the________tuned bikes.

As these and hundreds of other small improvements were ________, the results came faster than anyone could have ________. Just five years after Brailsford took over, they________ the road and track cycling events in all the important Games.

Imagine loving someone so much that you’d swim more than 5, 000 miles to see him or her. Dindim ____ swim that far every year to visit his friend Joao. This is ____ , not only because of the love between the two friends, but because Dindim is ____ a penguin. Joao found Dindim covered in oil, barely alive on a beach near his home. He picked him up, cleaned him off and brought him to his house where he ____ him and got him healthy again. Joao named him Dindim.

After a week, he brought the penguin back to the beach and tried to release him, _____Dindim refused to leave Joao. They lived together for the next eleven months. Then, Dindim disappeared. ____, Joao thought he’d never see his friend again. But just a few months later Dindim was back. He found Joao ____, and followed him home. Each year he ____ four months to live with other penguins. For the other eight months, he lives with Joao. Joao says that each time they meet again, Dindim seems ____ to see him. He says he loves the penguin ____ he were his family. He feels certain that Dindim loves him in the same way. Ecologist Carl Safina says that animals can and do love humans. He writes and speaks a lot about animals and their ____ . According to Carl, it’s clear that animals feel love for humans. What’s less obvious is whether or not humans love animals enough to ____ them. Hundreds of thousands of animals are killed by the same oil that____ Dindim when Joao found him.

Fifty percent of ____ has died out in the last 40 years because of humans’ ____their habitats. Scientists say we’re in a new mass extinction period. In the next two generations, they predict that we’ll lose 75 percent of the remaining species on earth.