When I was 19 years old, I was at a dance club. As we were walking to my car one ________ night, a man walked up to us. Behind him was a woman carrying a small child. The child had a ________ on but it wasn’t buttoned up. The man began to tell us he wanted to ________ some money for the night to get his wife and kid into a hotel. He had a job but no ________ to live in and was ________ the first pay check. He said he could get our mailing address and ________ the money back.

The guy I was with reached into his ________ to give this man a $ 20 bill. As the other man was extending his hand out to take the ________ , I put my hand on my new friend’s hand and said, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

I told him that every day people asked my mother for money on her way to work. She said they made more money than she did, ________ begging for money. These people were scamming those with ________ hearts. And if they were ________ worried about their child suffering from the cold, they would have at least ________ his jacket or covered him with his blanket.

My new ________ looked at me with disappointment and said, “Michelle, I know there are people out there that ________ others. I also know there are people out there that are one paycheck away from being ________ . If I give $ 20 to 10 people and only one of them really needs it and uses it for the ________thing, it is worth it.”

I am now 37 years old and have never forgotten ________ he said to me. I don’t even ________ his name. But I do remember that experience ________ the way I look at different________ .

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.

As a kid, I often suffered from nosebleeds. My parents had some ________ of traditional Chinese medicine, and they said this was caused by my love for ________ fruits. Lychees, my ________, had given me “too much heat.” But it didn’t stop me from eating them by the ________. After we moved from China to Canada, lychees became harder to find. Whenever we drove to a Chinatown, I would ______ all the fruit markets for my red jewels.

As I grow older, trying new fruits widens my horizons. Just when I thought I had _____ every pleasant fruity smell in the world, the lulo (龙葵) appeared at my regular fruit shop. Its taste left me wide-eyed and ________. The strong, sweet flavor filled my whole house for days. It was such a ________ smell that I’d rather believe it was picked from a food scientist’s imagination.

“What lasted is what the soul ate,” Jack Gilbert wrote in his poem The Spirit and the Soul, “The way a child knows the world by putting it into his ________.” Each tasting is a chance to be ________ with my inner child. The experience is no less ________ than seeing the ocean for the first time, leaving me ________ what else this world has been hiding from us.

I try most fruits only several times because I always love newer things. But there is one I keep returning to: the soursop (刺果番荔枝). When it is ripe, it tastes wonderful. Wait just one more day, ________, and it starts to brown, giving off a terrible smell. Yes, it goes bad fast, ________ that life is too short. So don’t let our sweetest days ________. “Taste” the joys around us as they come along.