2023届高考英语外刊阅读模拟强化训练完形填空专题二十三

高考英语外刊阅读模拟强化训练 完形填空专题二十三 ① At 7:01 A.M., my twin daughters, Natasha and Ariel, were scheduled to begin third grade at Chengdu Experimental Primary School. For my wife, Leslie, and me, getting our daughters into Chengdu Experimental had been a long and mysterious 1 . In the spring of 2018, we had travelled from our home in Colorado to Chengdu in order to visit schools. We’d come away with a good 2 of Chengdu Experimental, which is considered to be perhaps the best public primary school in the city. But administrators were noncommittal about 3 Ariel and Natasha. The school had no recent 4 of educating foreigners, and if the twins were to attend they would be the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand. At 4:30 P.M., I waited alone in front of the gate. When Class Six 5 out of the schoolyard, Teacher Zhang walked at the front of a neat line of children, and Ariel and Natasha were at the end. The twins held it together until they reached me. “I feel so stupid!” Ariel said. She burst into tears, pressing against my side. “We didn’t understand anything!” Her sister was also 6 : “I don’t want to go back!” A few parents looked 7 in my direction, and Teacher Zhang hurried over. She was middle-aged, with large, alert eyes and a gentle 8 . “I think that it was difficult for them,” she said. I thanked her for her 9 , and I said that we would continue to work on Mandarin at home. I waited for Ariel and Natasha to 10 before we walked to the subway station. In order to become proper Chinese third graders, Natasha and Ariel needed to memorize a total of sixteen hundred 11 . They started with ten a day. Leslie organized our system of home study, and every afternoon, when the twins returned from school, she 12 them a new stack of flash cards. For each set of ten, we quizzed them twice: first on 13 , then on writing. The flash cards outlined the correct stroke order, and the twins wrote the char