2022届高考英语阅读素材：张桂梅 Zhang Guimei – woman fighting for girls' education in China

阅读素材：张桂梅 Zhang Guimei – woman fighting for girls' education in China When girls came back from their exam site for the Gaokao, China's annual college entrance exam, on June 8, Zhang Guimei hid in the office, refusing to come out. She wouldn't let reporters interview her nor have students bid her farewell. This year, she sent 150 female students to college from a free all-girls high school she had founded in 2008 in southwest China's deep mountains. For the past 13 years, a total of 1,954 female students have graduated from this school, the first and only one of its kind in the country. "To educate a girl is to change the destiny of three generations," Zhang said. The 64-year-old teacher from southwest China's Yunnan Province was presented with the July 1 Medal by Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, at a ceremony in Beijing on Tuesday. Read more:?CPC holds ceremony to honor outstanding Party members A fighter Zhang was born to a family of ethnic Manchu minority group in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province in 1957. At the age of 17, she came with her sister to Yunnan as part of a team supporting the country's border regions. She met her husband in the pastoral city of Dali and worked as a teacher in a local school. But the good times didn't last long. Her husband died of gastric cancer in the mid-1990s, five years into their marriage. Inconsolable, Zhang decided to leave this place with which she was too familiar. After her husband's funeral, she packed her stuff and went some 260 kilometers away to Huaping, an impoverished county nestled in the mountains. ? There she witnessed dire poverty and the tragedies that it led to. "The destitution just sprawls in front of you, naked and straightforward," she recalled. One day, Zhang saw a teenage girl sitting beside a shabby grass basket with a sickle in hand and staring at the opposite hilltop. She went to ask her if there was something wrong. The girl replied, "I want to go to school, but my parents are too poor to afford it. They have me engaged to be married, as they can get betrothal gifts (also known as "bride price") from the bridegroom." Zhang went to her home to persuade the parents, promising she could afford her tuition and living expenses, but to no avail.? Over those years, she discovered that many female students would just disappear after studying for a while. The reasons varied: to pay for the younger brother's tuition, the girl's parents would have her quit and return home for a job or work?on the farm; the family received betrothal gifts, and the teenage girl would have to get married. After becoming a "mother" at a welfare home for children in 2001, which she renamed as "Children's Home," Zhang learned more about the backgrounds of those young kids. Some of the mothers went to prison for killing abusive husbands while others died from childbirth due to medical misconceptions, leaving behind their newborns. Over time, Zhang ... ...