I grew up in a poor family with my father, my mother and six brothers. We had little money, _________ plenty of love. I understood that no matter how poor a person was, he could still own a _________.

My dream was to be a sportsman. I was so _________, My high-school coach（教练）was Ollie Jarvis, who not only believe in me, but _________ me how to believe in myself. One thing with my coach changed my life forever.

It was one summer holiday. I wanted to do a summer job _________ a new bike. Then I realized I would have to _________ summer baseball training. I’m afraid of telling my coach about it.

_________ I told Jarvis, he was as mad as I expected him to be. “You have your whole life to work,” he said, “but your playing days are limited （有限的）. You can’t afford _________ them.”

I stood before him and _______ knew what to say.

“How much are you going to make at this job?” he asked.

“$3.25 per hour,” I replied.

“Well,” he said. “Is $3.25 an hour the price of a dream?”

That question made me realize the ________ between wanting something right now and having a long-term（长远的）goal. I chose to give up the job and devoted（致力于）myself to the training that summer. My dream came true in the end.

The Chinese language is said to be difficult to learn. Is this true? It depends.

At the age of 13, I started taking Mandarin (普通话) classes at school in the UK. I learned some characters and used them to make ______. It was difficult. In every class, most students hide ______ books. But when I came to China in 2021, I found learning the language could be ______.

In Beijing, I lived with local people. I knew practice makes perfect, so I would ______ chat with them in Chinese. Sometimes we would go to KTV together. In KTV, I found the ______ of my learning Chinese has improved. I could understand words in songs quickly.

When I walked into a KTV room for the first time, I felt it was really ______ from that of a classroom. With every note(音符) I sang, I began to understand the ______ between English and Chinese. Then I could remember the words from the songs. ______ made learning less like work and more fun for me. As I sang, I found the ______ to learning Chinese well. I can express myself ______ with the words I learned from the songs. If the foreigners have found their own ways to learn Chinese, they will learn it better and better.

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely(模糊地) _______ the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see things again, _______ a disaster can do strange things to people. It happened to me the other day that I might not have come to love _______ as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not sure that I would believe in it so _______. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I _______ mean that the loss of _______ made me enjoy more of _______ I have now.

Life asks us to keep making _______ to reality(现实，实际). If a person is able to get ready for   anything   changeable, his world will _______ more   meaningful. I became blind, but I was ________. My parents and my teachers saw ________ in me—a potential(潜力) to live, you might call it “which I didn’t see, and they make me fight it out with blindness”.

The hardest ________ I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was what I had to do at least. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would become a chair rocker for the ________ of my life. When I say I believe in myself, I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase ________. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: A belief that I could deal with anything alone; that somewhere in the ________ there is a special place where I can make myself fit.