When I am in middle school, my mom confirms that I am, in fact, a baked good. “Children are like bread,” she _________ to me one night at the kitchen table as we talk about the kind of person I am and what I will become. “You can choose _________ which you will add to the mix when they are younger and there is still time to _________ them after the dough (面团) has risen. But _________ you put them in the oven, it’s difficult to do much else.” “You’re already in the oven,” she tells me. “It’s all you now.”

My mother always invited me to _________ her production, especially during our traditional Baking Day. My small but essential tasks filled me with _________ to help. I watch as she kneads (揉) dough briskly and skillfully. This _________ will become any delicious food I can name, a cookie, or a muffin.

My most important job is to pay attention and _________ as she explains each step of the process. Each time she _________ something in or out of the oven, she notes the time. Nothing will be burned under her watch. When it’s time to __________ the labors of our day, she will hold it to admire her creations. Sometimes I __________ her looking at me the same way.

Over time, my mother’s dough metaphor developed into __________ of a touchstone. I am now nearly the same age my mother was. Only recently have I __________ her metaphor was never about the making and baking of the dough; it was about __________ her work and then letting go. Her occasional glance of admiration and a glimpse of love well says how __________ she is of her most cherished dough.

As a high school senior, I took Calculus(微积分). I had a famous teacher, Mr. Winkler. There was group work in that class, and challenging tasks intended to help students to really _________ why Calculus worked. But I wasn’t good at it. So I took my “C”, which Mr Winkler was _________ enough to provide. Later I went off to college, fully_________to never study math again.

But at college, I met Professor Howard Bernstein. We talked about the classes, the subjects, and the whats and whys of _________. We talked about what it meant to be educated. I got inspired to examine why I _________ math. So the following semester I took Calculus. Finally I earned an A⁺. My college Calculus professor was polite, but he was not a _________teacher than Mr. Winkler. The_________was me: I, the student, was ready to learn.

Last year, my daughter was in second grade. I'd heard_________reports about her teacher. Her teacher turned out to be a _________fit for my daughter. But for some of my daughter’s friends, she was great. __________my daughter’s third-grade teacher has been wonderful for her, and she's gone from "hating math", to considering "__________teacher " as a future career.

Sometimes we have teachers who__________ us, while we also have others we’re just not yet ready to learn from. And sometimes we have teachers whom we just don't __________. That's a natural part of the human experience.

Teaching is a ( n ) __________job, and different students have different needs at different needs at different times in their lives. The most I can reasonably __________ of their teachers is that their teachers try to be the best for all kids.

Turkey is not my thing, but one dish I cannot live without on Thanksgiving is my mom’s Snowy Mashed Potatoes. I start________these potatoes, my annual time release capsule of pure joy in early November. I’m pretty sure I’ve had them at every Thanksgiving since I was a kid, and bites often transport me back to different years and different dining rooms.

How and why is it that certain foods give us so much________ ? And what can be said about the kinds of foods we consider most comforting? Science tells us that taste and nutritional content affect how foods make us feel, but certain foods are especially________ satisfying for reasons that have little to do with their taste or nutritional content. Much of the happiness we get from our favorite foods comes from the memories they stimulate for us and the people we’re with while we________them. Past and present________shape the foods we find comforting.

Often, we love food because we have________ memories associated with it. My mom’s mashed potatoes (土豆泥) remind me of holiday joy and past reunions with extended family. We are also drawn to foods we were given early in life by people who cared for us, which can help explain our________ love for chicken noodle soup, which many parents feed their sick children to make them feel better.

The smell of food can________powerful memories, too. The part of the brain responsible for processing smell directly connects to the amygdala, a brain region that processes emotions, and the hippocampus, which handles memory. And our memory for smells is________and precise, especially when it comes to smell we were first exposed to in childhood. That’s why you might catch the smell of pumpkin pie baking in the oven and be transported back to the first tine you baked it with your grandmother.

These________can go the other way, too. Sometimes you might feel________when you eat foods that remind you of loved ones you miss. We may also________foods that we associate with bad experiences.

In addition to past memories, the________in which we eat foods shapes how much we enjoy them in the moment, and our gustatory (味觉的) experiences can be________by a sense of community, a sense of warmth and enjoying it together.I________my mom’s Snowy Mashed Potatoes that much more today because I got to eat them with my husband and two children, the three people I love most in the world.