It has been said before, but experiencing it myself has made me want to say it again: a smile can cross all language barriers.

       I recently moved from Canada to a small city on the south coast of South Korea to work as an English teacher. My first few weeks in Chinhae were challenging. I knew only one fluent English speaker other than myself---my employer. So, having left my family and friends far away on a different continent and having moved to a city in which I was the only foreign English teacher, I felt a bit shaken.

       At the grocery stores, I could not read the food packages and certainly did not know how to ask for help. _____________. Such little frustrations began to add up and I soon felt homesick and tired．I longed for some familiar food, familiar sounds, anything familiar!

       One night, after a long day at work, I was feeling particularly weary ---My legs were aching and I wasn’t looking forward to cooking dinner. Just as I was about to push the key into the door, the old woman who was the landlady called to me and signed me into her apartment. I didn’t understand a word she said, but I understood her smile. I followed her into her kitchen, which smelled like the wonderful Korean foods I was coming to love. After she had put many dishes of food on the table and had set me up with a glass of cola, she sat down across from me. We were both laughing the whole time at our complete inability to communicate in words. We did manage to have a small conversation, though. It went something like this:

       “Canada?” She asked slowly, pointing at my chest.

       “Yes,” I answered.

      “Korea?” I said, pointing at her. We both laughed.

       When it was time to leave, I said “thank you” in Korean, using some of the few words I had learned．I went home to my apartment feeling less alone than I had expected to feel that evening. Chinhae felt less like a strange and frightening place, and more like a home. I don’t think the old landlady knew how much her smile and her wonderful food meant to me that evening, but perhaps someday I will be able to tell her.

1．Why did the author feel challenged during the first few weeks in Chinhae?

       A．Chinhae is a small city.

B．Only her boss was kind to her.

       C．Few people could communicate with her.                             

D．She had difficulty in teaching English in Korea.

2．Which of the following sentences can be put in the blank?

       A．Nobody could help me.

       B．I thought I’d better learn Korean.

       C．The food at the grocery stores made me homesick.

       D．Once I bought sugar, which I thought was salt.

3．The underlined word “weary” (in Paragraph 4) most probably means “______”

       A．excited                B．lonely                  C．homesick            D．tired

4．From the passage we can infer that_____.

      A．the author will soon move back home

       B．the author was deeply moved by the old lady

       C．the author learned more Korean after the dinner

       D．the old lady was very lonely because she had no children