【美国精神】第93期

Explanation:

    The border between the United States and Mexico is the international border that is crossed more often than any other international border in the world. It stretches (or reaches) 1,969 miles (or 3,169 kilometers) and touches four U.S. states: Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. There are about 250 million legal crossings every year, and many more that are illegal (or against the law).

    When the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, Mexico and the United States signed an official agreement called the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Treaty put the border between the two countries on the Rio Grande and the Colorado River. In that same agreement, Mexico ceded¹ (or gave away) more than half of its land, or about 525,000 square miles (or 1.36 million square kilometers), to the United States.

    About 80,000 Mexicans lived in that area when the land was transferred and its ownership changed from Mexico to the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave those Mexicans U.S. citizenship². In that same treaty, the United States also agreed to honor (or respect) the property rights (or the ownership of land) of the Mexicans who lived in the land that was transferred from Mexico to the United States. However, there are many cases (or stories) where the United States did not honor those property rights and those Mexican Americans sometimes complain, saying that what the United States did was unfair.

    Today, most of the southwestern United States is on land that used to belong to Mexico, and many of the people who live there are descendants³ (or grandchildren and great-grandchildren) of the people who lived there when the land was still part of Mexico. Mexican traditions (or old way of doing things) still affect life in those areas today. In fact, Mexican culture and traditions have had so much influence (or effect) on the southwestern United States that a style of cooking called Tex-Mex, which is short for Texas-Mexican, has become very popular not only in that part of the country, but all over the United States.

 

问题：

Name one state that borders Mexico.

Answer:

• California

• Arizona

• New Mexico

• Texas

1 ceded   

v.让给，割让，放弃( cede的过去式 )

参考例句：

• Cuba was ceded by Spain to the US in 1898. 古巴在1898年被西班牙割让给美国。
• A third of the territory was ceded to France. 领土的三分之一割让给了法国。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 citizenship   

n.市民权，公民权，国民的义务(身份)

参考例句：

• He was born in Sweden,but he doesn't have Swedish citizenship.他在瑞典出生，但没有瑞典公民身分。
• Ten years later,she chose to take Australian citizenship.十年后，她选择了澳大利亚国籍。

3 descendants   

n. 后代，后裔 名词descendant的复数形式

参考例句：

• They were the direct descendants of the Dutch settlers. 他们是荷兰移民的直系后裔。
• They are the descendants of Queen Victoria. 他们是维多利亚女王的后裔。