After my brother died in an accident, my mother was in deep sadness. I was only a four-year-old girl at the time, but I still understood the sudden shift in my mom’s attitude towards safety. Suddenly everything around us was potentially dangerous. Overnight, the world had gone from a playground to a dangerous zone. I grew up with a lot of limits and rules. I couldn’t walk home from school by myself, even though everyone I knew already did. I couldn’t go to summer camp because what if something happened to me?
As I got older, the list of things of fear got longer. My whole life was divided into “things you should avoid”, and “things you needed to do in order to have a good, long life.” I became a natural worrier. I worry about things like getting cancer, losing my wallet, car accidents, earthquakes, and losing my job — disasters big and small, real and imagined.
The funny part is that you’d never know it by looking at my life. In fact, I’ve developed a rule for myself: If it scares me, then I have to do it at least once. I’ve done lots of things that my mom would have worried about: I’ve ridden a motorcycle; I’ve traveled —a lot. I’ve performed stand-up comedy, and I’m planning my second wedding.
There’s something else I don’t usually talk about, but it’s a cornerstone in my belief: When I was 14, my mother died suddenly in a car accident. At my mom’s funeral I remember making a choice. I could either live out the rest of my life trying to be “safe” or I could be brave enough to live out a fulfilling, exciting and, yes, sometimes dangerous life.
I worry that I may have betrayed(背叛) my mother by writing her in this light, but she has been a driving force in my life and, in the end I think she would have been proud of me. Courage isn’t a natural character of human beings. I believe that using courage is like developing a muscle. The more often I do things that scare me or that make me uncomfortable, the more I realize that I can do a lot more than I originally thought I could do.
Even though I inherited (继承) my mother’s cautious nature. I’ve also come to believe that fear can be a good thing, if we face it. Believing that has made my world a less scary place.
小题1:In the writer’s childhood, the limits and rules were used to ______.
| A．improve her behavior | B．develop her independence |
| C．be in memory of her dead brother | D．protect her from possible danger |
小题2: How does the writer deal with the things that frighten her?
| A．She just ignores them. | B．She faces up to them. |
| C．She turns to her mother for help. | D．She does them with her friends. |
小题3:From the passage, we can learn that ______.
| A．the writer failed in her first marriage |
| B．nothing can make the writer afraid now |
| C．frightening things made the writer lose her self-confidence |
| D．the writer’s mother felt annoyed with her |
小题4:What does the passage mainly talk about?
| A．Mothers influence their children much. |
| B．Fear is in fact not a bad thing. |
| C．Facing fear bravely produces courage. |
| D．The world is not as scary as people expect. |
