Snowy was a beautiful little horse. Since she was born she has wanted to be a show jumping horse. Every day she would ______her mum to allow her to ______. Finally, her mum decided that she was ______ enough and they went into the jumping arena(竞技场).

Snowy was very ______, but when she saw how _____ the jumps were, she started shaking. “I can’t jump that high. It’s good idea that we ______,” she said. Her mum said, “I wouldn’t expect you to ________ that high. There’s a log(原木) on the ground. Why don’t you start jumping over that?” Snowy gathered(积聚) her ______, walked to the log and then ______ to jump over it.

“I did it!” she shouted happily. Soon Snowy developed good ______ in jumping over logs.

____, her mum said, “You can’t just jump over logs ______ you want to be a show jumper.

____ the low jump over there.”

Again, Snowy was ______, but she tried it and found she could do it. As time went on, Snowy progressed to taller jumps, until finally she ______ the arena and looked at the tallest jumps.

Over the past few weeks, something had ______. These jumps seemed much less ______ to Snowy. She jumped over them easily. Her mum looked with ______ at her and said, “This is what happens when you start ______ and build your way up.”

So never be afraid of ______ in life, but start small and keep trying. Then you’ll be able to do anything.

In December 2004, I had just become a professional photographer and was working on a project about communities who live on the sea.

One morning, I went out to _______ with six fishermen in a small boat. It was about 8 am, and the sea looked different. The water was totally still.

20 minutes later, one fisherman pointed to a small white _______ far in the distance. It was getting bigger and bigger very quickly. A tsunami(海啸)wave was _______ through the ocean! We were stuck. I began to feel really _______. Then the captain took control. He told us where to sit, so we would _______ the boat. My camera was in my backpack. I wanted to picture the scene, but I couldn’t. Any movement would imbalance the boat. Suddenly there was a huge noise. The wave _______ the boat, but the incredibly _______ captain managed to swerve(使突然转向)us up and onto the wave. We surfed it for a few seconds. Then the boat glided(滑行)from the tip of the wave down into safe waters. Everyone let out heavy sighs. The captain had _______ us all.

Surviving gave me a deep understanding of how _______ life can be. The picture I wanted to take on the boat remains “the one that got away” - I think every photographer has one. But mine ________ my life.

My daughter and I were swimming in our pool one summer day. This day was like any of the other days,   so I had no way of knowing that this one would go down in our family history as a ________ we cherish（珍惜）and still talk about from time to time.

The sun was setting and the night was quickly approaching. My daughter ________ it first-a spider（蜘蛛）was spinning her web at the bottom of the freshly painted blue fence that ________ our pool. It surprised me that she saw this, and it surprised me even more that she wasn’t ________ of the spider.

Instead, she ________ watched as the spider busied herself in the cycle of life. As we both watched this ________ of mature, a very simple thought ________ me. I had lost the track of ________ I honestly didn’t know how long we had been just staying there. But, the truth was that we were ________ having fun. We hadn’t saved the world or _____ the newest most expensive toy. However, I believe that by ________ this experience of the spider building her web, we were both just quite happy.

What we had done was to spend time together and ________ the simple things in life. We laughed and talked about the ________ of life, and what it means to die and what it means to really live. We talked about how precious our ________ amount of time is on this planet and how we should ________ to enjoy the simple things in life like the flight of a bird. The simple things are the best things in life, even when they include spiders and webs.