2015高考英语阅读理解提速特别训练.docVIP

2015高考英语阅读理解提速特别训练 A Growing up in a small town in rural Malaysia, we did not have many toys. We had to be creative, so we built kites, played with sand and made jumping ropes from rubber bands. My father worked on my grandfather’s rubber-tree plantation, and sometimes he would take me with him and show me the thick, white rubber milk extracted (提取) from the trees to produce natural rubber. After school, I dreamed of becoming an engineer, but I could not get into my local university, because Malaysia’s race-based system limits the number of Chinese students. Like many of my friends, I had to leave Malaysia to go to university. My brother and I landed in Kansas on a snowy day in the spring of 1991. I had never seen snow before and barely spoke any English. I remember thinking I was halfway round the globe and that, if I screamed, nobody would hear. A year after I graduated, the Asian economy crashed, and many of my friends back home lost their jobs. In 1997, the US economy was booming, and with a master’s in mechanical engineering, it was easier to find a job in the US. So I started a career in crash safety in Detroit’s motor industry. I loved my job, but regretted not seeing my two daughters much. They were 9 and 12, and distant towards me. One night after work, I saw them making bracelets (手镯) from rubber bands and I thought, “Hey, I know how to do this. Maybe I can impress you girls.” I sat down and showed them how to link the rubber bands together, using the same technique we had used to make jumping ropes back in Malaysia. But the bracelets kept falling apart. I went down to my basement, grabbed a board and stuck multiple rows of pushpins into it. Then I started linking the bands in a zigzag, like a diamond shape, and it worked really well. The next day, my daughters took a bunch of colorful bracelets to school. I became a neighborhood hero overnight. Children would come up to me and ask me to make them bracelets. It was my older daughter, Teresa, who first sug