Directions: Complete the-passage by choosing the proper words or phrases in the box Each word can only
be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. imaginary       B. lonely       C. failure       D. created       AB. ambition AC. isolated       AD. produced       BC. taking       BD. attempted       CD. knocking

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap year on either side, and I hardly saw my father before
I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely. I had the 1______ child's habit of making up
stories and holding conversations with 2______ persons, and I think from the very start my literary 3______
was mixed up with the feeling of being 4______. I knew that I had a natural ability with words and a power
of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that it 5______ a sort of private world in which I could get my own back
for my failure in everyday life.
However, the quantity of serious writing which I 6______ all through my childhood would not add up to
half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, with my mother 7______ it down on a
piece of paper. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had "chair-like
teeth"-a good enough expression. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a poe which was
printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time,
when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished "nature poems." I also, about twice, 8______ a short
story which was a 9______. That was the total of the would-be serious work that actually set down on paper
during all those years.

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