|
閱讀理解
One day in 1965, when I was a librarian at View Ridge School in Seattle, a fourth grade teacher came to me.She had a student who finished his work before all the others and needed a challenge.“Could he help in the library?”e asked.I said,”Send him along.”
Soon a slight, sandy-haired boy in jeans and T-shirt appeared.“Do you have a job for me?” he asked.
I told him about the Dewey Decimal System for shelving books.He picked up the idea immediately.Then I showed him a pile of cards for long-overdue books that I was beginning to think had actually been returned but were misshelved with the wrong cards in them.He said,”Is it a kind of a detective job?” I answered yes, and he became a continuous detective.
He had found three books with wrong cards by the time his teacher opened the door and announced,”Time for rest!” He argued for finishing the finding job; she made the case for fresh air.She won.
The next morning, he arrived early.“I want to finish these books,” he said.At the end of the day, when he asked to be a librarian on a regular basis, it was easy to say yes.He worked untiringly.
After a few weeks I found a note on my desk, inviting me to dinner at the boy’s home.At the end of a pleasant evening, his mother announced that the family would be moving to a neighbor school district.Her son’s first concern, she said, was leaving the View Ridge library.“Who will find the lost books?” he asked.
When the time came, I said an unwilling good-bye.Though at first he had seemed an ordinary kid, his zeal(熱情)had set him apart.
I missed him, but not for long.A few days later he came in the door and joyfully announced:“The librarian over there doesn’t let boys work in the library.My mother got me to come back to View Ridge.My dad will drop me off on his way to work.And if he can’t, I’ll walk!”
I should have had an idea such focused determination would take that young man wherever he wanted to go.What I could not have guessed, however, was that he would become a wizard(奇才)of the Information Age:Bill Gates, tycoon of Microsoft Microsoft and America’s richest man.
|