阅读理解

       The car was invented just a century ago.  You may know all kinds of cars' names, but many people

don't know who was the inventor of the first car.

       The first car was invented not by an Englishman, but by an American. His name was Henry Ford.

       Henry was born in a poor family. He was the eldest of the six children.  When he was a boy, he

became interested in watches and machines. When he was twelve years old, his mother died. Soon he had to work in a machine shop for two dollars and fifty cents (美分) a week.

       In the evenings he repaired watches for another dollar a week. The hard life made him strong and

able.

       At that time, there was another interest in the life of the young Ford. He wished of making a machine.

It could run without horses, so named horseless carriage. He overcame (克服) a lot of difficulties and in

April 1893,  the "horseless carriage" was invented at last,  it was the first car.

       Later Henry Ford founded the Ford Moxor Company. He was really the first inventor of the car in the world.

1. Who really invented the car first?

A. A Chinese.              

B. An Englishman.

C. A Russian.              

D. An American.

2. From this story we can know the car was invented________.     

A. only one hundred years ago

B. less than one hundred years ago

C. more than one hundred years ago

D. long, long ago

3. Henry Ford must have__________ .

A. five brothers and sisters

B. six brothers and sisters

C. five younger brothers

D. five younger sisters

4. How many dollars did young Ford get cvery week?           

A. 2.5 dollars.                  

B. 1.5 dollars.

C. 3. 5 dollars.                

D. 3 dollars.

5. He invented the first car __________ .    

A. with his brothers        

B. without any difficulty

C. himself                

D. difficult

A few months back, Desalegn Godebo’s wife descended into a feverish delirium. "It was as if she were mad, “he said, shuddering at the memory.” she was scratching me like a crazy woman." Before a new road was built through this village, Godebo would have loaded his wife onto his back and hiked six hours along narrow dirt paths to the small city of Awasa. Instead, he lifted her into a truck for the one-hour ride to town. Her condition was diagnosed as malaria and typhoid. She is well now and back home caring for their baby. The dirt-and-gravel road may look like a timeless feature of the Great Rift Valley (东非大裂谷). But it is part of a huge public road-building project that is slowly hauling one of the poorest, hungriest nations on earth into modernity. The people who live along it divide time into two eras: Before the Road and After the Road. Because of the road, people can take their sick to the hospital and their children to distant schools. Farmers like Godebo who had only their own feet or a donkey’s back for transport can now transport their crops to market. Ethiopia, an agricultural society where most farmers still live more than a half-day’s walk from roads, has been especially hobbled by their absence. Support for roads in Africa, particularly from the World Bank, is growing again after a decade of decline in the 1990s. Then the bank reduced lending for roads. Road-building is coming back in style as a way to combat rural poverty in Africa. While no one expects roads alone to end the chronic hunger faced by millions of Ethiopians or the famines that loom periodically, most development experts agree that they are a precondition for progress and are essential to the success of the Green Revolution, which produces abundance in much of Asia but bypasses Africa.