二外英语一口语考试朗读材料.docVIP

When I was young, I thought that reading was like a drug which I was allowed to take only a teaspoon at a time, but which, nevertheless, had the effect of carrying me away to an enchanted world. As time went by and I took that drug again and again, I became addicted to it. Books became an intrinsic part of my life. They became my friends, my guides, my lovers. My most faithful lovers. I didn’t know I would fall in love with books when I was young and started to read. I don’t even recall when I started to read and how. I just remember that my mother didn’t like me to read. In spite of this, every time I had an opportunity I would sneak somewhere with a book and read one page, two pages, three, if I were lucky enough, always feeling my heart beating fast, always hoping that my mother wouldn’t find me. For her, books were nothing. For me, they were everything. According to the Small Business Administration, the number of family-owned companies — many of which are run by mothers and daughters — is on the rise. In 1988, of the nearly 19 million companies in the United States, more than 13 million were sole proprietorships. Most of those were described as family-owned businesses with two or more related individuals who were working together. While there are no hard numbers of how many mother-daughter companies exist, experts agree that more mothers and daughters are going into business together. “About 90 percent of American businesses are family-owned or -controlled,” says a family business consultant. “People still prefer, whenever possible, to work with people they know.” Walter Anderson joined the ranks of the HA Society the same year I did. I felt a special kinship to him as I heard his story — for reasons that will be obvious as I relate it here. Walter grew up in a four-room railroad flat on the wrong side of the tracks in New York, in an atmosphere made volatile and violent by an illiterate, abusive, alcoholic father. “I lived with fear every day, nearly every min