2024年3月14日发(作者：)

英语六级阅读试题：美籍华人的历史

英语六级阅读试题：美籍华人的历史

2016年12月英语六级考试将在12月17日开考，为了帮助广大

同学高效备考，下面是yjbys网店铺提供给大家关于英语六级阅读试题：

美籍华人的历史，希望对大家的备考有所帮助。

The History of Chinese Americans

Chinese have been in the United States for almost two

hundred years. In fact. the Chinese had business relations with

Hawaii prior to relations with the mainland when Hawaii was not

yet part of the United United States investments

controlled the capital of Hawaii at that time. In 1788,a ship sailed

from Guangzhou to Hawaii. Most of the crewmen were Chinese.

They were considered the pioneers of Hawaii. The Immigration

Commission reported that the first Chinese arrived in the United

States in 1820. eight in 1830 andseven hundred and eighty in

1850. The Chinese population gradually increased and reached

64,199 in 1870.

For many years it was common in the United States to

associate Chinese Americans with restaurants and laundries.

People did not realize that the Chinese had been driven into

these occupations by the prejudice anddiscrimination that faced

them in this country.

The First Chinese to reach the mainland United States came

during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Like most of the other

people there, they had come to search for gold. In that largely

unoccupied land,the men staked a claim for themselves by

placing markers in the ground. However. either because the

Chinese were sodifferent from the others or because they worked

so patiently that they sometimes succeeded in turning a

seemingly worthless mining claim into a profitable one, they

became che scapegoats of their envious competitors. They were

harassed in many ways. Often they were prevented from working

their claims; some localities even passed regulations forbidding

them to own claims. The Chinese therefore started to seek out

other ways of earning a living. Some of them began to do che

laundry for the white miners; others set up small restaurants.

(There were almost no women in California in those days,and the

Chinese filled a real need by doing this“woman's work”.) Some

went to work as farmhands or as fishermen.

In the early 1860's many more Chincse arrived in

time the men were imported as work crews to

construct the first transcontinental were sorely

needed because the work was so strenuousand dangerous, and

it was carried on in such a remote part of the country that the

railroad company could not find other laborers for the job. As in

the case of their predecessors,these Chinese were almost all

males; and like them, too, they encountered a great deal of

prejudice. The hostility grew especially strong afrer the railroad

project was complete, and the imported laborers returned to

California-thousands of them, all out of work. Because there were

so many more of them this time,these Chinese drew even more

attention than the earlier group did. They were so very different

in every respect: in their physical appearance,including a

long“pigtail”at the back of their otherwise shaved heads; in the

strange, non-Western clothes they wore; in their speech (few had

learned English since they planned to go back to China); and in

their religion. They were contemptuously called “heathen

Chinese” because there were many sacred images in their

houses of worship.

When times were hard. they were blamed for working for

lower wages and taking jobs away from white men. who were in

many cases recent immigrants themselves. Anti-Chinese riots

broke out in several cities. culminating in arson and bloodshed.

Chinese were barred from using the courts and also from

becoming American citizens. Californians began to demand that

no more Chinese be permitted to enter their state. Finally. in 1882.

they persuaded Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act,

which stopped the immigration of Chinese laborers. Many

Chinese rerurned to their homeland, and their numbers declined

sharply in the early part of this century. However. during the

World War II,when China was an ally of the United States. the

Exclusion laws were ended; a small number of Chinese were

allowed to immigrate each year, and Chinese could become

American citizens. In 1965, in a general revision of our

immigration laws,may more Chinese were permitted to settle

here,as discrimination against Asian immigration was abolished.

From the start,the Chinese had lived apart in their own

separate neighborhoods, which came to be known as

“Chinatowns”. In each of them the residents organized an

unofficial government to make rules for the community and to

settle disputes. Unable to find jobs on the outside, many went

into business for themselves-primarily to serve their own

neighborhood. As for laundries and restaurants. some of them

soon spread to other parts of the city,since such services

continued to be in demand among non-Chinese, too. To this day.

certain Chinatowns. especially those of San Francisco and New

York. are busy. thriving communities, which have become great

attractions for tourists and for those who enjoy Chinese food.

Most of today's Chincse Americans are the descendants of