Passage 1 

The day I met Hani, she was a shy, seventeen-year-old girl standing alone in the parking lot of the international school in Indonesia, where I teach English. The school is expensive and does not accept Indonesian students. She walked up to me and asked if I could help her improve her English. 

 I could tell it took immense courage for the young Indonesian girl in worn clothing to approach me and ask for my help. 

“Why do you want to improve your English?” I asked her, fully expecting her to talk about finding a job in a local hotel. 

“l want to go to an American university, ”she said with quiet confidence. Her idealistic dream made me want to cry.

 I agreed to work with her after school each day on a volunteer basis. For the next several months, Hani woke each morning at five and caught the city bus to her public high school. During the one-hour ride, she studied for her regular classes and prepared the English lessons I had given her the day before. At four o9 clock in the afternoon, she arrived at my classroom, exhausted but ready to work. With each passing day, as Hani struggled with college-level English, I grew more fond of her. She worked harder than most of my wealthy students. 

Hani lived in a two-room house with her parents and two brothers. Her father was a worker and her mother was a maid.I learned that their combined yearly income was 750 U. S. dollars. It wasn’t enough to meet the expenses of even one month in an American university. Hani’ s enthusiasm was increasing with her language ability, but I was becoming more and more discouraged. 

One morning in December 1998, I received the announcement of a scholarship opportunity for a major American university. I tore open the envelope and studied the requirements. It wasn’t long before I realized that there was just no way for Hani to meet the qualifications. 

When Hani came into the classroom the next day, I told her of the scholarship. I also told her that I believed there was no way for her to apply. I encouraged her to be realistic.However, Hani remained firm. 

“Will you send in my name?” she asked.

 I didn’t have the heart to turn her down. I completed the application, filling in each blank with the painful truth about her academic life, but also with my praise of her courage and her perseverance. I sealed up the envelope and told Hani her chances for acceptance were next to none. 

In the weeks that followed, Hani increased her study of English, and I arranged for her to take the Test of English Fluency in Jakarta.The entire computerized test would be a challenge for someone who had never before touched a computer. For two weeks, we studied computer parts and how they worked.Then, just before Hani went to Jakarta, she received a letter from the scholarship association. What a cruel time for the rejection to arrive, I thought. Trying to prepare her for disappointment, I opened the letter and began to read it to her. She had been accepted. 

I leaped about the room excitedly. Hani stood by, smiling quietly. The image of her face at the moment came back to me again and again in the following week. I realized that I had learned something Hani had known from the beginning： It is not intelligence alone that brings success, but also the drive to succeed, the commitment to work hard and the courage to believe in yourself. 

41. When the writer learned about Hani’s dream, she wanted to cry because____________.