Coming home from school, I bounded up the steps, and burst into the living room. I was __________ by what I saw. Mother sat on the couch, __________. I had never seen that.

I approached cautiously and touched her shoulder. “Mother?” I said “What’s happened?” She wiped away tears and managed a weak smile “__________ important. Just that I’m going to lose the job at the radio station. I can’t __________ fast enough.”

“You have been practicing typing on your green typewriter recently and I believe you’ll catch on,” I said. “you always said you could do anything __________ you set your mind to it.” I reached out and put my arms around her.

“I __________ think I can in most things, but I can’t do this.” She said __________.

She broke then. She put her face __________ my shoulder. Finding Mother in tears, I began very slowly to __________ the pressure on her.

She was still my mother, but she was something more: a person like me, capable of fear and hurt and __________. I could feel her pain as she must have felt __________ on a hundred occasions when I had found comfort in her arms.

A week later Mother took a job selling dry goods, but the evening practice sessions on that green typewriter __________. I had a very different feeling now when I passed her door at night and heard her tapping away. I knew there was something more going on in there than a woman learning to type.

Several years later, Mother successfully accepted a job as a newspaper reporter with our hometown paper.

The __________ green typewriter sits in my office now, unrepaired. When I’m having trouble writing an article and think about __________, I roll a piece of paper into that machine and type, word by painful word, just the way mother did. What keeps in my mind then is not her failure, but her __________ to go ahead.

Tim hated family meetings. He couldn’t hear very well _______ his baby sister, Kathy, was shouting and making loud noise. His _______ were going to talk to him and his brother, Denny, about doing something they didn’t want to do.

“The whole family is _______,” his mom said. “Kathy is moving from our bedroom into Denny’s room. And Denny will move into Tim’s room.”

“No way!” Tim _______. “Denny’s got ten million plastic models all over the place. I can’t work _______ if my room is messy.”

“OK, here’s _______ we will do this,” Denny said. “We’ll put down a line. You get your side and I get mine. And I’ll hang my _______ from the ceiling (天花板). But I get to paint my side of the room and the whole ceiling blue!”

Tim _______ blue, “You can’t pick the color. And you got the whole ceiling? It’s _______. It’s my room, too!”

Their father held up his hands. “You both love the Flag Football Team. The __________ colors are blue and green. What if you both paint blue and green all over the walls?”

Tim wasn’t so sure he liked the __________. The next day they started painting. He had to say that he and his brother __________. They were really satisfied with their job.

Tim wanted his desk to stay in front of the window. Denny wanted his desk in front of the window, too. So mom moved __________ desks face to face. Now they both could look out of the window. What a __________ solution!

In the end, they all wanted to have a family __________ in the new room. They all lay down on the soft floor looking up at the beautiful ceiling. Now Tim loved family meetings.

Mike and Alan are my best friends. We are in the same ___. Mike is ___, so he sits in the front of the classroom. Mike likes ___. He can play the guitar and the drums, but his favorite thing is ___. He likes Animal World and Sports News very much. He thinks they’re very interesting. Mike ___ watches soap operas. He thinks they’re boring. Oh, I agree ___ him. I also think soap operas are very ___.

Alan likes collecting ___. You can always see lots of things in his schoolbag. Yesterday he ___ Mike and me two things. Oh, he also asked us what we _____ them. Mike liked the key ring and the wallet. Er, I didn’t like them. I thought they were for girls.