Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 2

We had emigrated to this country from China, and during our early days here we had a hard time with American table manners.

For the rest of the evening, too mortified to go back to the dining table, I nursed a bit of potato salad on my plate.

I wasn’t sure how she would feel about me after the spectacle our family made at the party.

Father, being an engineer, was always systematic. He took out a pocket French dictionary. “They told me that most of the items would be in French, so I came prepared.”

And in the silence, our family’s consumption of soup suddenly seemed unnaturally loud.

An ugly sweater like that, all raggedy and old, but Mrs. Price believes her.

I wish I was invisible, but I’m not. I’m eleven and it’s my birthday today and I’m crying like I’m three in front of everybody.

The scientists were saying that with the remedies they were employing now and the remedies begun twenty years ago—they’d stopped all nuclear testing and all manufacturing of ozone-depleting chemicals was banned worldwide—the scientists were saying that the sun, the global problem, would begin to get better.

The clothing, the gloves, the goggles, were uncomfortable and cumbersome.

Masha had taken her grandchildren before, but they’d sat on the sand, listlessly, sifting it through their gloved hands with bored little faces.

What was it: a mass of undrinkable, hostile water. Hostile like the sun.

They hated this forlorn place where the sun had obviously drained the life out of everything.