Good afternoon, everyone,
I’d like to introduce my friend Christy to you all. Christy is a great example of how one person with 1   can make her dream a reality, so she should win the Student of the Year Award.
Christy loves to ride bikes. She does not just ride along city streets, 2   . She is interested in 3   trail (小路) rides. 4    Christy knew that people who love riding had to travel 5   the city to locate good bike trails, so she 6   to do something.
Christy knew that Roosevelt Park had a clean, lively creek（小溪） 7   through it. 12 miles of land around the creek was 8   used. Christy decided to get together with other trail9  to ask the city council to 10  a bike path along the unused land. Christy   11  a petition (請愿書). She and other riders asked all of their biking friends if they would12   the list, and they gathered 300 signatures. The city council evaluated the 13   and, more 14  , agreed to allow the bike trail.
The 15   took two months of work, and now Roosevelt Park has a 16   bike trail. It has many ups and downs; it is a great ride. This trail is becoming one of the community’s important 17   spots. I can’t 18   with Christy when we ride together, but I am glad that she decided to work hard to begin the 19     of the Roosevelt Park bike path. Christy 20   this award because she acted on her dream, causing a community to come together.
Thank you!

There was once, in a little market-town not far from Upsala (瑞典一城市), a peasant who lived there with his family, digging the earth during the week and singing in the choir on Sundays. This peasant had a little daughter to whom he taught the musical alphabet before she knew how to read. Daae was a great musician, perhaps without knowing it. Not a violinist in Scandinavia played as he did. His reputation was widespread and he was always invited to set the couples dancing at weddings and other festivals. His wife died when Christine was entering upon her sixth year. Then the father, who cared only for his daughter and his music, sold his land and went to Upsala in search of fame and fortune. He found nothing but poverty.
He returned to the country, wandering from fair to fair, playing his Scandinavian music pieces, while his child, who never left his side, listened to him in delight or sang to his playing. One day, at Ljimby Fair, Professor Valerius heard them and took them to Gothenburg. He insisted that the father was the first violinist in the world and that the daughter had the making of a great artist. Her education and instruction were provided for. She made rapid progress and charmed everybody with her prettiness, her grace of manner and her real eagerness to please.
When Valerius and his wife went to settle in France, they took Daae and Christine with them. "Mamma" Valerius treated Christine as her daughter. As for Daae, he became ill with homesickness. He never went out of doors in Paris, but lived in a sort of dream which he kept up with his violin. For hours at a time, he remained locked up in his bedroom with his daughter, playing and singing, very, very softly.
Daae seemed not to recover his strength until the summer, when the whole family went to stay at Perros-Guirec, in a far-away corner of Brittany, where the sea was of the same color as in his own country. Often he would play his saddest tunes on the beach and pretend that the sea stopped its roaring to listen to them. And then he persuaded Mamma Valerius to allow him to leave for a while. At the time of the "pardons," the village festivals and dances, he went off with his violin, as in the old days, and was allowed to take his daughter with him for a week. They gave the smallest villages music to last them for a year and slept at night in a barn, refusing a bed at the inn, lying close together on the straw, as when they were so poor in Sweden. At the same time, they were very neatly dressed, refused the halfpence offered to them; and the people around could not understand the behaviour of this country violinist, who walked heavily on the roads with that pretty child who sang like an angel from Heaven. They followed them from village to village.
【小題1】 When he was in the countryside, Daae did NOT __________.

Inspiration
“Mama, when I grow up, I’m going to be one of those!” I said this after seeing the Capital Dancing Company perform when I was three. It was the first time that my __36__ took on a vivid form and acted as something important to start my training. As I grew older and was __37__ to more, my interests in the world of dance __38__ varied but that little girl’s dream of someday becoming a __39__ in the company never left me. In the summer of 2005 when I was 18, I received the phone call which made that dream a __40__; I became a member of the company __41__ back to 1925.
As I look back on that day now, it surely __42__ any sense of reality. I believe I stayed in a state of pleasant disbelief __43__ I was halfway through rehearsals (排練) on my first day. I never actually __44__ to get the job. After being offered the position, I was completely __45__. I remember shaking with excitement.
Though I was absolutely thrilled with the change, it did not come without its fair share of __46__. Through the strict rehearsal period of dancing six days a week, I found it vital to __47__ up the material fast with every last bit of concentration. It is that extreme __48__ to detail (細節(jié)) and stress on practice that set us __49__. To then follow those high-energy rehearsals __50__ a busy show schedule of up to five performances a day, I discovered a new __51__ of the words “hard work.” What I thought were my physical __52__ were pushed much further than I thought __53__. I learned to make each performance better than the last.
Today, when I look at the unbelievable company that I have the great __54__ of being a part of, not only as a member, but as a dance captain, I see a __55__ that has inspired not only generations of little girls but a splendid company that continues to develop and grow-and inspires people every day to follow their dreams.

The simplest way to say it is this: I believe in my mother. My __1__ began when I was just a kid．I __2__ becoming a doctor.
　　My mother was a domestic．Through her work, she observed that __3__ people spent a lot more time reading than they __4_ watching television. She announced that my brother and I __5__ watch two to three pre-selected TV programs during the week. With our free time, we had to read two books each from the Detroit Public Library and __6__ to her written book reports. She would mark them up with check marks and highlights. Years later we realized her marks were a __7__. My mother was illiterate.
　　When I entered high school I was a(n) __8__, but not for long. I wanted the fancy clothes. I wanted to __9__ with the guys. I went from being an A-student to a B-student to a C-student. One night my mother came home from __10__ her various jobs and I complained about not having enough Italian knit shirts. She said, "Okay, I'll give you all the money I make this week scrubbing floors and cleaning bathrooms, and you can buy __11__ food and pay the bills. With everything __12__, you can have all the Italian knit shirts you want." I was very __13__ with that arrangement but once I got through allocating money, there was __14__ left. I realized my mother was a financial genius to be able to __15__ a roof over our heads and any kind of food on the table, __16__ buy clothes. I also realized that immediate satisfaction wasn't going to get me anywhere. Success required intellectual preparation. I went back to my _17__ and became an A-student again, and eventually I __18__ my dream and I became a doctor.
　　My story is really my mother's story-a woman with __19__ formal education or property who used her position as a parent to change the lives of many people around the globe. There is no job __20__ than parenting. This I believe.

The right to pursue happiness is issued to us all with our birth, but no one seems quite sure what it is.
A holy man in India may think that happiness is in himself. It is in needing nothing from outside himself. If wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. We westerners, however, are taught that the more we have from outside ourselves, the happier we will be, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. Advertising, one of our major industries, exists not to satisfy these desires but to create them---and to create them faster than any man’s money in his pocket can satisfy them. Here, obviously someone is trying to buy the dream of happiness and spending millions upon millions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers.
I doubt the holy man’s idea of happiness, and I doubt the dreams of the happiness-market, too. Whatever happiness may be, I believe, it is neither in having nothing nor in having more, but in changing --- in changing the world and mankind into pure states.
To change is to make efforts to deal with difficulties. As Yeats, a great Irish poet once put it, happiness we get for a lifetime depends on how high we choose our difficulties.
It is easy to understand. We even demand difficulty for the fun in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. And a game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are man-made difficulties. When the player ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the roles. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to cast away all the rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules.
The same is true to happiness. The buyers and sellers at the happiness-market seem to have lost their sense of the pleasure of difficulty. Heaven knows what they are  playing, but it seems a dull game. And the Indian holy man seems dull to us, I suppose, because he seems to be refusing to play anything at all.
The western weakness may be in the dreams that happiness can be bought while eastern weakness may be in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect happiness in man himself. Both of them forget a basic fact: no difficulty, no happiness.
【小題1】Who shares the same idea of happiness with the author?