全国2010年7月自学考试英语试题_第8页

Passage 2
1. We are so used to seeing cars on our streets and our roads that it is strange to think that only a century has passed since the birth of the man who invented the automobile.
2. On July 30, 1863, in the middle of the American Civil War, Henry Ford was born to a family of farmers in the state of Michigan. He was the eldest of six children. His home was much like that of many other children of that day; His parents were hardworking, careful, and sensible. On the peaceful farm, far from cities and stores, tools had to be made and repaired without outside help. Henry loved to make things. Even when he was still a young boy, he could take a watch apart and put it together again. Soon he was repairing the watches and clocks of all the neighbors, as well as those of his own family. A friend of the family once said, “Every clock in the Ford home trembles when it sees Henry coming!”
3. When Henry was twelve years old, his mother died. Mr. Ford loved his son, but he was afraid that the boy’s interest in machines would make him discontented with a farmer’s life. He was right. Henry did not want to stay in the country. After many disagreements with his father, Henry went to Detroit, the nearest large city. There he went to work in a machine shop for two dollars and fifty cents a week. In the evenings, he repaired watches for another dollar a week. After paying for food and a bed, he had fifty cents a week to spend.
4. While working in Detroit. Henry began to think about more efficient ways of making watches. He designed a machine that could make 2,000 watches a day—but he did not know how he would sell so many watches in Detroit, and so he abandoned the idea. Later in his life, when he had solved the distribution problem, he sold many more than ten thousand automobiles each week.
5. Only nine months after his arrival in Detroit, he had to give up city life Because his father needed help on the farm. But this time there was less dull work for him; he could spend his free time repairing the broken steam engines of his neighbors and talking of the time to come when all hard work on farms would be done by machines.
6. There was another interest at this time in the life of the young Henry Ford. A girl who lived nearby, Clara Bryant, pleased him and he began to arrange matters so that he could afford to marry. His father still hoped to make Henry a farmer, and now gave him eighty acres of forest for a wedding present. Henry sold the wood, keeping only enough to build a house, and he brought his wife to it in April, 1888. Here they spent three quiet years.
7. During this time he was busy designing a startling new machine that would run under its own power and carry people. He called it a “horseless carriage.” Henry suggested to his wife that they move back to Detroit where he could get the necessary money to build his machine. In Detroit he spent all his free time, as well as a lot of money working on his plan. His neighbors thought that his dream was foolish and impossible. But finally in 1903, he built a car that was light, low to the ground and fast enough to race against other cars. He called his automobile the “999” after a famous express train. Then he was able to establish the Ford Motor Company, and from then on he never had any difficulty finding money to finance his business.