Mary Richards was my great-grandmother, my
mom’s grandmother. I never knew her, but Mom
Text 2
3 Read the text and answer the
questions.
1 Whose grandmother was Mary?
                    
2 Why didn’t the writer meet Mary?
                    
3 When and where was Mary born?
                    
4 Did a lot of girls become doctors
in those days?
                    
5 Why did Mary leave school?
                    
6 Why did Larry and Mary wait
before they got married?
                    
7 How old was Mary when she got
married?
                    
8 How old was she when she had
her first child?
9 Was she a good student at night
school?
10 Did she go to university before or
after the Second World War?
___/10 marks
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says she was a very special person. Mary was born
in a small town in England in 1914. She was a
clever girl, and she wanted to be a doctor, but girls
hardly ever went to university in those days. Mary’s
family were poor, so Mary left school when she was
only 14 to find a job in the kitchen of a big London
restaurant.
One day, a young man called Larry came to
the restaurant. He saw Mary and they fell in love.
But they were both very poor and very young, so
they didn’t get married for a long time.
Finally, in 1935, Larry and Mary got
married. Two years later, they had a baby girl, my
grandmother, and then they had another child, a
little boy this time. Larry worked hard to make
money for his family, and after the Second World
War he and his family lived in a big house with
servants. And that’s when Mary said to him one
day: ‘Larry, I want to go back to school, and then I
want to go to university.’
Mary was 33 years old, but she went to night
school and studied hard. She had excellent marks,
and so she went to university and became a doctor.
She retired in 1980 and died in 1989, ten years
before I was born.
Total: ___/60 marks