The White Fence

When my husband, Jerry, died of cancer, I became angry. Life wasn’t fair.

One day, diving down a busy road in my town, I noticed a new fence being built round a house. It had once sat back from a ___________ street. Then the road was ___________, and the house had hardly any front garden at all.

Each time I drove past the house, I watched the rapid progress of the fence. An elderly women added an overhead rose shelf and painted it all snow-white, and then did the whole house to _________.

One day, I ___________ the road to stare long and hard at the fence. The carpenter had done such a magnificent job that I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I turned off the engine, walked over and touched the fence, which ___________ smelled of fresh paint.

“Hi!” I called, waving.

“Well, hey,” she stood up straight.

“I — I — came to see your ___________. It’s beautiful.”

She smiled. “Come and have a drink, and I’ll tell you about it.”

We walked up the back steps, and sat down. I was suddenly overjoyed that I was having a cold drink ___________ the beautiful white fence surrounding me.

“THE FENCE ISN’T FOR ME,” the woman ___________ seriously. “I live alone. But ___________ so many people come by here, I thought they’d enjoy seeing something really pretty. People look at my fence and wave. A few, like you, even stop and have a talk.”

“But didn’t you mind when this once quiet street was widened and there was so much ____________?”

“Change is part of __________ and the making of character. When things happen that you don’t like, you have two choices: you get ____________ or better.”

When I left, she called out, “Come back any time. And leave the gate ____________. It looks more friendly.”

I carefully left the gate half-open and drove off, ____________ something deep inside me. I didn’t know what to call it, but I could picture the hard brick wall round my angry heart ____________. And in its place this neat little white fence was being built.

I planned on leaving the gate open for whatever or whoever might come my way.

A seven-year-old boy has become one of the youngest people to cycle from London to Paris. He is raising money for a charity that_________him after his father’s death.

Rupert, from Leicestershire, had already_________more than ￡11,500 for the Children’s Bereavement entre, almost a week before he started the_________. Cycling was an activity Rupert used to enjoy doing with his Dad, so the _________is also a way for him to keep his Dad’s memory _________.

_________, Rupert didn’t enjoy cycling at first. He had been afraid of speed, and had almost lost_________in riding a bicycle after falling off his bike and got injured for several times. His Dad_________him up: “If you stop here, the pains are wasted because you get nothing back. Try a few more times, and make the pains_________.” That was true. Cycling with his Dad was such fun; his Dad never__________to him.

Rupert’s life was__________forever when his Dad passed away in 2019. As Rupert was only four at the time, it was__________for him to understand what had happened. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, it ended up being a really__________time for Rupert and his Mum. That was when the Children’s Bereavement Centre came to help. They taught Rupert to__________ some of the emotions he was feeling and also__________him to other children so that he felt less __________.

With some help from his Mum, Rupert decided to__________ this challenge to raise lots of money for the Centre so they can support more families. “We are absolutely__________that Rupert has decided to do so. It’s a great__________for anyone to cycle 200 miles from London to Paris, let alone a seven-year-old boy. Rupert is a real__________,” Kate Baxter, CEO of the charity, told BBC News.

When I was a kid, my family was very poor. So I was taught how to save and_________money and deeply understood the value of it. My father, as a rag-and-bone man, would take me on the back seat of his bicycle, showing me how to find _________that stored garbage to sell. Meanwhile,_________poverty, I learned to wait for the tourists to leave to_________and sell the empty bottles they had left in the garbage bin to_________my tuition fees next term.

All of those experiences at first made me feel_________, but gradually, I found that everyone in my village has the_________ of collecting wastes and turning them into something_________, which has helped me understand that there is no_________in trying to make a decent living.

But the situation is__________ now. The financial literacy I acquired as a kid__________ me as I continue my life as a graduate student. The schools class __________financial knowledge did help me know more about money, but still I lack the__________of saving money for myself. The root cause of it __________the fact that saving money alone cannot solve money problems. I once went to a__________ to have a wisdom tooth pulled and it__________me 500 yuan, which was a huge__________for me. Since then, I found that the best financial literacy was to be tested by life itself, since one can never know how to value money__________they make it themselves and spend it on tiny things.

I do agree that financial literacy should be __________at school, but I would like to __________that financial literacy should also be taught by life and experience of poverty.