With new term approaching, as a new teacher, I needed to find a reference book in our school library. Therefore, I went in search of the _______. Before leaving, I struck up a(n) _______ with her and then I was completely _______ by her experience.

During the winter break, she had gone by herself to Death Valley, a rarely visited desert. She just rented a car and packed up some simple equipment. All the way, she _______ saw another human being as she drove or _______. The photos she showed me _______ me from freezing New England to the brilliant sunshine of Death Valley, where she could appreciate the appealing landscape. But what really _______ me was how fearless this woman is. So weak is she that I used to think that she was _______ to step out of the comfort zone.

I asked her if she was _______ of being out in the vast wilderness alone and she said no ________. She even loved being alone surrounded by such incredible ________, seeking the meaning of life. Further talk revealed that her life has been ________. She was a young single mother with 2 kids and worked at odd jobs day and night to ________. To her credit, she obtained her degree in education and found a decent job.

Actually, our brief talk inspired me to lead a more ________ life and she taught me to see a person beyond the ________.

Ten years ago, I set out to examine luck. I wanted to know why some people are ________ in the right place at the right time, while others consistently experienced ill fortune. I ________ notices in national newspapers asking for people who felt consistently lucky or unlucky to contact me.

Hundreds of extraordinary man and women volunteered for my ________. Over the years I interviewed them, watched their lives and had them ________ various experiments.

I carried out a simple ________ to discover whether their differences in luck was due to differences in their ability to ________ opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. I had ________ placed a large message halfway through the newspaper saying “Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $50.”

This ________ took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to ________ it and the lucky people tended to spot it.

Unlucky people are generally more ________ than lucky people, and this anxiety affects their ability to notice the ________. As a result, they miss opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to gatherings focused on finding their perfect partner and miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers ________ to find certain types of job advertisements and miss other types of jobs.

Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there ________ just what they are looking for. My research eventually showed that lucky people create good fortune via four ________.They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition(直觉), create self-fulfilling prophesies(预言)via positive expectations, and adopt a “never say die” attitude that ________ bad luck into good.