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.

A primary school teacher in Kentucky went above and beyond to make sure that one student was included during her class field trip. Instead of _______ a fourth-grader who uses a wheelchair to miss out, Jim Freeman, a teacher at Tully Primary School,_______ to carry 10-year-old Ryan Neighbors on a specially made backpack.

Shelly King, Neighbors' mother, says that her daughter has spina bifida (脊柱裂) and has used a wheelchair for her _______. Because of the lack of wheelchair access, previous school trips had been _______ for the young girl.

Neighbors' family found out that this year the class would be _______ the Falls of the Ohio State Park. It would be _______ for Neighbors to go there, so the family started to plan a different _______ just for her. _______, Freeman, who teaches the class next door to Neighbors' _______, stepped in and helped carry her around the park using a ________.

Freeman's ________ brought King to tears. "It warmed my ________ ", King said, "He's not even Ryan's teacher and he was so pure-hearted that he ________ to make sure that she was included and not ________. “ Neighbors' mother said.

King took to social media (社交媒体)to ________ Freeman and the staff at Jefferson County Public Schools. So far, the post has been ________ thousands of times.

"This is just one physical act that you can see, but we do this ________ times throughout the school day and throughout the year,” Freeman responded. “All the ________ here at Tully work harder than most people ________.”

For Neighbors, however, the generous act provided a(n) ________ that would likely stick with her for years. "Never feel like you're left alone," Neighbors said.

Monty owns a house ranch (牧场) in San Sedro. Once when asked about his success, he told the story about a young man, son of a horse trainer.

One day at high school the boy was asked to write a paper about what he wanted to be and do when he_________

That night he wrote a seven-page paper describing his_________of someday owning a horse ranch. He wrote about his dream in great detail and even drew a diagram of a 200-acre ranch, _________the location of everything important there.

The next day he handed it in to his teacher. Two days later he got his paper back. On the front page was a large red F with a _________that read, “see me after class."

The boy went to the teacher. The teacher said, “This is an unrealistic dream for a young boy like you. You come from a _________family. Owning a ranch requires a lot of money. There's no way you could ever do it.”

Then he added, “If you will rewrite this paper with a more practical goal, I will reconsider your _________”

The boy went home and thought about it long and hard. Finally, the boy turned in the same paper. making no_________at all.He stated,“You can keep the F and I’ll keep my _________.”

Monty then said,“I was that boy. And the best part of the story is that two summers ago that_________ teacher brought 30 kids to camp out on my ranch for a week. When he was leaving, the teacher said, “When I was your teacher, I was something of a dream stealer. During those years I__________a lot of kids” dreams. Fortunately, you had enough courage not to give up on yours.”