Anyone who is afraid of failure and afraid to face challenges will never taste success, so said our professor in marketing. I laughed it off at that time, but got frightened when it actually happened in my life.

I landed in a small city in the Middle East to set up a firm, a world－class car rental firm. Having decided on the project, I earnestly settled in preparation. With a positive mind, I told myself nothing should stop me now, and was more than keen to make it a success.

However, the least expected thing happened. Iraq invaded Kuwait. Tension ran high in the region. Eventually the war broke out, and many people fled the country, leaving my firm in deep trouble.

As usual, “things become difficult, and every effort seems to bring disappointment, it can be tempting to lower your expectations or even water down your goals and ambitions.” I was no exception. I thought of running away. I remembered the words of Thomas Edison, “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to succeed when they gave up.”

I decided to hang on, telling myself, “I am not afraid of challenges and obstacles.” I stayed on through months of uncertainty and insecurity. Finances ran low, and banks could not wait to get their dues. To add to all this, the banks even threatened to take all my vehicles. I felt I made a wrong decision to move there. I was now ready to face failure.

I was living against all hopes, believing that something good would happen. After 2 months the war ended. My persistence paid off: people started flooding back and the car bookings picked up, five times over.

Success comes to the one who dares, even after failure, to think positively and look forward confidently. After all, it is only the experience that makes a man tough. Failure does not mean you will never make it. It means that it will take a little longer. It provides us with a learning experience.

A．get rid of	B．smooth away
C．make less forceful	D．improve on

As a kid, I often got nosebleeds. My parents blamed all the fruits I ate that gave me “excessive heat”— especially the mangoes, my favorite. It didn’t stop me from wolfing them down by the dozens.

As I’ve grown older, my fixation on exotic (奇异的) fruit has intensified — the weirder, the better. The disadvantage of being an armchair pomologist (果树栽培学家) in Canada is that most of our fresh fruit is imported. The silver lining is that almost everything in my local stores qualifies as exotic and interesting. Trying a new fruit expands my understanding of the world and enriches my experience within it. “What lasted is what the soul ate,” Jack Gilbert once wrote, “The way a child knows the world by putting part by part into his mouth.” I think of these lines when I prepare to eat a new fruit. Each tasting is a chance to be reunited with my inner child, to be wide-eyed and wordless as I get to know it.

Those tasked with naming these fruits appear to be equally under a spell, producing names as simplistic as they are charming. Cotton candy grapes. Ice cream bean. Dragonfruit.

Most fruits I try only a couple of times, but there’s one I keep returning to: the soursop. At ideal ripeness, the soursop tastes like the ideal tropical fruit. Wait just a day, though, and it smells more like feet than fruit. This rapid rot comforts me, incredibly. Watching a beloved fruit transform from unripe one to sticky flesh feels like witnessing an act of living. The plant sacrifices fruit in hopes of spreading its seed; life was always the point. An approaching expiration date is only encouragement to enjoy these accessible joys as they come. We, too, will soon find our bodies softened and bruised. Will we have let our sweetest days go to waste?

There is a famous story about British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was writing a poem when he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

This was an age before the telephone. Someone was delivering a message. When Coleridge got back to his poem, he had lost his inspiration. His poetic mood had been broken by the knock on his door. His unfinished poem, which could otherwise have been a masterpiece, would now never be more than a fragment (片段).

This story tells how unexpected communication can destroy an important thought. That brings us to the invention of the cellphone.

The most common complaint about cellphones is that people talk on them to the annoyance of people around them. But more damaging may be the cellphone’s disruption (中断) of our thoughts.

We have already entered a golden age of little white lies about our cellphones, and this is by and large a healthy, protective development. “I didn’t hear it ring” or “I didn’t realize my phone had shut off” are among the lies we tell to give ourselves space where we’re beyond reach.

The notion of being unreachable is not a new concept — we have “Do Not Disturb” signs on the doors of hotel rooms. So why must we feel guilty when it comes to cellphones? Why must we apologize if we decide to shut off the cellphone for a while?

The problem is that we come from a long-established tradition of difficulty with distance communication. Until the recent mass use of cellphones, it was easy to communicate with someone next to us or a few feet away, but difficult with someone across town, the country or the globe. We came to take it for granted.

But cellphones make long-distance communication common, and endanger our time by ourselves. Now time alone, or a conversation with someone next to us which cannot be interrupted by a phone, is something to be cherished (珍惜). Even cellphone devotees, myself usually included, can’t help at times wanting to throw their phones away, or curse the day they were invented.

But we don’t and won’t, and there really is no need. All that’s required to take back our private time is a general social recognition that we have the right to it.

In other words, we have to develop a healthy contempt (轻视) for the rings of our own phones. Given the ease of making and receiving cellphone calls, if we don’t talk to the caller right now, we surely will shortly later.

A cellphone call deserves no greater priority than a random word from the person next to us. Though the call on my cellphone may be the one-in-a-million from Steven Spielberg — who has finally read my novel and wants to make it his next movie. But most likely it is not, and I’m better off thinking about the idea I just had for a new story, or the slice of pizza I’ll eat for lunch.