2020 is drawing to a close. I haven’t seen my ______ in a year.

“Take care of yourself, my dear granddaughter,” she spoke into the phone. “I’m ______ already and have lived long enough. Don’t you worry.”

I didn’t want this to be her last ______. While I stay locked in the Klang Valley, she lives far away and is indifferent (不感兴趣的) to modern technology－which makes ______ difficult.

I knew she really ______ to see my face and began to try to find a solution (解决方法).

“Baby steps are the key. Start with what she already ______”, came the Internet advice. ______, she knows WhatsApp and that has a video call function.

“OK, Nani, you know WhatsApp, right?” I ______ her on our next call. “Did you know we can actually ______ each other by using the ______?” I   continued and heard an “oh” on the line. I knew I had her.

While the task is simple enough to us, the cloudy eyes of old age make it a(n) ______ task－coupled with the fact that the Internet connection isn’t always ______.

The first attempt (尝试) had some good results, ______ the angle (角度) was off. I could only see the very top of her head. In the second attempt, we made a little progress, but the poor Internet service ______ to allow us to see each other.

After two ______ attempts, I could tell she was getting upset (沮丧的) “It’s going to be worth it!” I ______ her during our next call.

Finally, on one good day of Internet connection, her ______ was on my screen.

No matter how many phone calls we exchange, nothing ______ seeing her face filled with happiness and love. Our experience shows that even if we can’t see each other ______, the Internet still makes it possible for loved ones to be continually ______.

Some kind of disaster happened in our home. It had a huge _______ on our lives. It challenged the _______ we relax and even where we sit. There was no fire or flood. We lost our Wi-Fi service, for over a week.

I was raised in the pre-Wi-Fi time, so I was relatively _______ to the situation. My children, however, did not have this training. When given the news that there was no Wi-Fi in the house, their first _______ was: “But, what will we do?” Fortunately, the TV still worked, although the children were _______ to find that it had only 70+ channels.

For the children, a major challenge was homework, most of which is now given online, so the _______ of the Internet meanwhile seemed to provide a(n) _______ version of “the dog ate my homework” excuse. My daughter observed that one of her friends had her water supply temporarily _______ due to a leak (渗漏), but she was convinced that our situation was much _______. “You can still go to the shop and buy water, right?”

My husband and I need the Internet to ________ us to work at home. Luckily, I’ve found out that these days you can go to the shop to buy Wi-Fi. However, buying 1 GB of data makes you view your broadband ________. I don’t want to ________ it like leaving a tap running. We log on to the Wi-Fi network and do what we have to do as ________ as possible and log off.

Therefore, the changes that ________ has created in our daily life have occurred without us really noticing. The ________ part of our time without Wi-Fi was seeing the children make forts (堡垒) out of the sofa cushions, which they haven’t done in years.

Chris is a columnist (专栏作家) at citypages.com whose life turned upside down in 2017. Chris was willing to share his story but his own print deadlines made it a(n) ______ task for this time. In 2017 Chris found out his ______   condition left much to be desired and that he needed a kidney transplant (移植). Any person would have been lost in such a situation but Chris tuned to the place where he felt most comfortable——Twitter.

The whole operation thing takes lots of efforts on a donor’s (捐赠者) side and Chris continued ______ all the details on his blog and Facebook account. In the meantime, he was ______ a tiresome process of hemodialysis (血液透析) ______ waste and water removal from his blood and it generally takes 4 hours.

____, 19 people replied to Chris’s tweet (推特信息)! They were his lawyers or just people he met at some party months ago and even complete ______ None of them was his family, relative or Just a ______ friend. Just imagine all these people accepting medical checks, ______ their blood types and stuff of the kind to make a great ______ to a person they hardly knew! One person ______ ideally---Scott. Strangely enough Scott and Chris never met in person before the ______ and really saw each other for the first time on a thanksgiving evening. Both men felt that it was somewhat easier for them to let their communication flow on Social Media ______ a certain point of time. Scott sent Chris a ______ tweet even after the successful operation. When seeing Scott for the first time on a family dinner Chris couldn’t say all he wanted at first and his writing talent ______ at one time.

Social Media ______ worked! Chris has a healthy kidney now thanks to Scott, Twitter, Facebook, and the inventor of the web. For some people, ______ networks are pure evil or just time consuming black holes, but Social Media was once a ______ for Chris. It isn’t just a place where people ______ their time on lonely evenings. For some of us it is also one of few paths that can lead to a certain kind of ______.