Dear Teresa Silva, The official of the u...

In the kitchen of my mother's houses there has always been a wooden stand with a small notepad and a hole for a pencil.

I'm looking for paper on which to note down the name of a book I am recommending to my mother. Over forty years since my earliest memories of the kitchen pad and pencil, five houses later, the current paper and pencil look the same as they always did. Surely it can't be the same pencil. The pad is more modern, but the wooden stand is definitely the original one.

"I'm just amazed you still have the same stand for holding the pad and pencil after all these years." I say to her, walking back into the living-room with a sheet of paper and the pencil. "You still use a pencil. Can't you afford a pen?"

My mother replies a little sharply. "It works perfectly well; I've always kept the stand in the kitchen. I never knew when I might want to note down an idea, and I was always in the kitchen in these days. "

Immediately I can picture her, hair wild, blue housecoat covered in flour, a wooden spoon in one hand, the pencil in the other, her mouth moving silently. My mother smiles and says, "One day I was cooking and watching baby Pauline, and I had a brilliant thought, but the stand was empty. One of the children must have taken the paper. So I just picked up the breadboard and wrote it all down on the back. It turned out to be a real breakthrough for solving the mathematical problem I was working on."

This story, which happened before I was born, reminds me how extraordinary my mother was, and is also a gifted mathematician. I feel embarrassed that I complain about not having enough child-free time to work. Later, when my mother is in the bathroom, I go into her kitchen and turn over the breadboards. Sure enough, on the back of the smallest one, are some penciled marks I recognize as mathematics. Those symbols have traveled unaffected through fifty years, rooted in the soil of a cheap wooden breadboard, invisible exhibits at every meal.

1.Why has the author's mother always kept the notepad and pencil in the kitchen?

2.What is the author's original opinion about the wooden stand?

3.The author feels embarrassed for____________.

4.What can be inferred from the last paragraph?

One cold night, I was growing sick of my life in San Francisco．There I was walking home around one o’clock in the morning after a   31  practice at the theatre. With the opening night only a week away, I was still learning my lines by heart. I was having   32  handling my part-time job at the bank in the daytime and my acting at night at the same time. As I walked, I thought seriously about  33  both acting and San Francisco. I had  34  too much of city life.

As I walked down the  35  streets under the tall buildings, I felt very small and cold, so I began  36  both to keep warm and to keep away from any possible robbers. Very few people were still out  37  a few homeless people under blankets.

About a block from my  38 , I heard a sound behind me. I   39  quickly, half expecting to see someone with a knife or a gun. The street was empty. All I saw was a shining streetlight. Still, the noise had made me  40  so I started to run faster. Not until I reached my apartment building and unlocked the door did I   41  what the noise had been. It had been my wallet  42  to the sidewalk.

Suddenly I wasn’t cold or tired anymore. I ran out of the door and back to where I’d heard the noise. Although I searched the sidewalk   43  for 15 minutes, my wallet was   44  to be found.

Just as I was about to quit the  45  , I heard the garbage truck stop to the sidewalk next to  46  . When a voice came from the inside, “Alisa Camacho?” I thought I was dreaming. How could this man know my name? The door opened and out jumped a small blonde(金发碧眼的) man with an  47  look in his eyes. “Is this  48  you’re looking for?” He asked, holding up something like a wallet.

It was already 3 a.m. by the time I got into bed. I couldn’t get much sleep, but I had got my wallet back. I also had got back some  49  of city life. I realized the city couldn’t be a bad place  50  people were willing to help each other.

She told her husband that she couldn’t _______ the rest of the housework without his help.

After John stayed in Shanghai for a couple of days, he got the impression______ the city was very fascinating.

We tried ______ to persuade him to stay home, but at last, he went to the construction site despite his bad illness.