(CNN) -- Professional ballet dancer Michaela DePrince was just three years old when she saw a ballerina for the first time.

She was standing near the gate of the orphanage she was living in the West African country of Sierra Leone when she found a magazine with a female ballet dancer on the cover.

The image of the beautiful, smiling ballerina mesmerized the young orphan, who had just lost both of her parents.

"I was just so fascinated by this person, by how beautiful she was, how she was wearing such a beautiful costume," she remembers. "So I ripped the cover off and I put it in my underwear."

At the time, DePrince -- or Mabinty Bangura as she was then called -- had no idea what ballet was. But she kept onto the picture, dreaming of one day becoming as happy as the ballerina on the magazine cover.

"It represented freedom, it represented hope, it represented trying to live a little longer," she recalls. "I was so upset in the orphanage, I have no idea how I got through it but seeing that, it completely saved me."

Shortly after, DePrince was adopted by an American couple and began a new life in the United States. Today, at the age of 17, she is one of the ballet world's rising stars -- last month she traveled to South Africa to make her professional debut in Johannesburg.

"I worked very hard and I was en pointe by the time I was seven years old," says DePrince. "I just moved along fast because I was so determined to be like that person on the magazine and she was what drove me to become a better dancer, a better person -- to be just like her was what I wanted to be."

Answer the following questions:
1. How old was she when she first saw a ballerina?
2. Where did she see it?
3. Where was the ballerina?
4. Was she adopted?
5. By who?
6. When did she start dancing?
7. Where did she start dancing professionally?
8. Did she change her name?
9. From what?
10. To what?
1. three years old
2. Sierra Leone
3. magazine cover
4. yes
5. an American couple
6. doesn't say
7. Johannesburg
8. yes
9. Mabinty Bangura
10. Michaela DePrince