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【完形填空】Cloze: The Teacher Who Asked Why
The email arrived at 6:47 a.m., and Li Wen read it twice before her coffee went (1) cold.
She was 34, a test-prep teacher in Zhengzhou, and the message came from a parent she had never (2).
"My daughter cries before every mock exam," it said. "Can you help her?" Li put down her cup. She had 200 students that term, 38 hours of class a week, and no clear (3).
What she did have was a spreadsheet. Since 2019 she had tracked every student who walked (4) her door: enrolment dates, target scores, hours slept, even the brand of pen they used.
The data revealed a pattern she found (5). The harder she pushed, the more her students seemed to wither.
Not all of them. But enough. One girl, Zhang Yu, 19, had scored 7.5 on her first IELTS attempt, then (6) to 6.0 after eleven months of intensive drilling.
"I used to love reading," Zhang told her. "Now I see a passage and I feel (7)." Li stared at the number. It did not add up.
So she began to enquire differently. Instead of handing out another mock paper, she asked Zhang to (8) a diary for two weeks.
The entries were chaotic, fragmented, sometimes just one word. "Tired." "Empty." "Scared." But underneath the noise Li saw something (9): Zhang was not lazy. She was terrified.
The fear had become an addiction, a dose she took every morning, and it no longer (10) to logic.
Li had seen this before, in smaller doses, but never so clearly. She arranged to meet Zhang's mother, a nurse who worked night shifts at a provincial hospital. The woman sat across from Li in a noodle shop and said, quietly, "We moved here from a village 400 kilometres away. We sold our stock of grain to pay for this." Li did not know what to say. She ordered more tea.
What followed was not a revolution. It was a series of small, frustrating adjustments. Li cut her class size from 200 to 80, which meant her income dropped by 40 per cent, from 18,000 yuan a month to just under 11,000. She introduced a rule: no mock exams on Sundays. Parents complained. Two filed formal complaints with the school. One accused her of lowering standards, of being untrustworthy with their children's futures. Li listened, nodded, and kept going. She began to teach reading as a form of curiosity rather than a weapon. "Look at this word," she told her class one afternoon, pointing to a passage about a medieval mapmaker. "He drew dragons because he did not know what was there. That is not a drawback. That is the whole point." A few students laughed. Most just stared. But Zhang Yu wrote in her diary that night: "First time in months I did not dread tomorrow."
By the spring of 2023, the results were mixed. Zhang scored 6.5, not the 7.0 she had hoped for, but she had also started reading novels again, in English, slowly. Two other students from that smaller class surpassed their previous bests. But three dropped out entirely, and one, a boy named Chen, stopped answering messages. Li still does not know where he went. The school renewed her contract but cut her budget. The spreadsheet, updated weekly, now ran to 4,000 rows. Some nights she opened it at midnight and scrolled, looking for a pattern that might explain what she could not fix. The numbers did not offer guidance. They never did.
In August, Zhang Yu sent her a photograph. It showed a bookshelf in a university dormitory in Wuhan, 500 kilometres south, with a worn paperback on top: a collection of essays about climate and migration. "I chose this," Zhang wrote. "Not because it is easy. Because I want to." Li saved the photo. She did not reply immediately. Outside her window, the city was still loud, still hurried, still full of students carrying mock papers in plastic folders. She thought about the word "thrive." She had used it in class a hundred times. She was not sure she had ever taught it.
Choices
(1) A. cold B. badly C. warmly D. quickly
(2) A. seen B. met C. known D. called
(3) A. solution B. question C. answer D. plan
(4) A. past B. through C. into D. by
(5) A. exciting B. puzzling C. ordinary D. abhorrent
(6) A. raised B. stayed C. dropped D. improved
(7) A. happy B. sick C. excited D. bored
(8) A. keep B. write C. read D. draw
(9) A. clear B. obvious C. hidden D. apparent
(10) A. reacted B. replied C. responded D. answered