题目内容：

US student Vanessa Tahay stands out from the other teenagers in her school. Her skin is dark, her accent is thick, and if you ask her, she will tell you these are the things she is proudest of. Tahay is a poet, and at 18 she was considered among the best in Los Angeles.

When she is on the stage, audiences often go silent. They also laugh and cry. But this doesn’t come easily for someone who comes from a village that sits at the base of a huge mountain range in Central America. When she first appeared at school, she was teased by others for being short and different. She never spoke, so they called her “mouse”.

“How do I defend myself?” Tahay thought. “I don’t know how.”

“Keep going,” her mother would tell her. “At some point, you’ll learn.”

She spent hours after school and on weekends watching the same DVDs: English without Barriers.

Tahay’s elder brother, Elmer, persuaded her to go to the after-school poetry club. In the last six years, her English teacher Laurie Kurnick has turned Cleveland Charter High School’s poetry program into one of the most respected in the city. Her team draws from the likes of D.H. Laurence, Pat Mora and Kendrick Lamar to create poems about their own lives. The poems focus on many things —some funny, some painful.

The first time Tahay read the group’s poems, chills went up her spine (脊柱). “I wish I could write like that,” she thought. “I want to say something.”

She wrote her first poem about her first year in America. She called it Invisible. The day her turn came to recite in front of the team, she broke down crying. She cried for 15 minutes. “I had so much held in,” Tahay said. “I couldn’t even finish it.”

But she kept at it despite her less-than-perfect grammar, spelling and diction (措辞). Still, she wouldn’t tell her friends about her poetry because she worried they would make fun of her.

But with time, her poems changed her. “They gave me pride,” Tahay said. “They told me that I’m worth something.”

“She had this innocence,” Kurnick said. “This willingness to be genuine and show you things you don’t ever see.”

1.What did Tahay’s mother suggest she do when she was teased by others?

A. Fight with them bravely.    B. Report them to her teachers.

C. Try hard to make friends with them.    D. Ignore them and keep going.

2.What are the themes of Tahay and her team’s poems?

A. Their admiration for the great poets.

B. Funny and painful stories about their lives.

C. Their expectations of a better future.

D. Their appreciation of natural beauty.

3.How did Tahay probably feel when she first read the group’s poems?

A. She was cold.    B. She was nervous.

C. She was excited.    D. She was frightened.

4.How did Tahay benefit from writing poems?

A. She improved her grammar and spelling greatly.

B. She won many national poetry competitions.

C. She became the first student poet in the city.

D. She felt more confident about herself.