A
It was 1989. Lonnie Johnson was waiting nervously for a meeting with managers of a toy company, a yellow suitcase on his lap. Inside the suitcase was a new kind of water gun. Instead of a gun that shot a thin stream, this toy was engineered to spray water dozens of feet. “I had bought a machine to help make all of the parts myself out of different types of plastic,” Johnson says.
Johnson had worked on bigger projects. He once worked for NASA（美国国家航空航天局）, as a senior systems engineer. But he still worried about how his invention would go over. As an African-American in a field in which minorities were rare, he was often looked down upon, he says. “For most of my career as an engineer, I was put in environments where I was the only person of color in the room.”
Johnson knew that the toy industry could be fickle（易变的）. “It’s like the entertainment industry. You can’t predict whether a song is going to be a hit（流行） and how everyone will react to it.” When he finally stepped into the conference room, Johnson didn’t say much. Instead, he opened up his suitcase and pulled out a water gun.
“Does it work?”Myung Song, the company president, wanted to know. Johnson pumped（水泵吸水） the gun and pulled the trigger（扳机）.Water was shot across the room and hit the far wall. There was a silence. “Wow,”Song said in surprise.
“At that point, I knew I had caught their imagination.” Johnson says. “They could see what I had seen in the water gun all along.” The water gun went on to become one of the top-selling toys of the early '90s.
These days, Johnson has left toys behind to concentrate on solving a more urgent problem. With scientists at Tulane and Tuskegee universities, he is working on a method for transforming heat into electricity. He hopes that his technology will improve solar-power panels（太阳能电池板）and make green energy more affordable. “My goal,”he says, “is to get this to market as soon as I can.”
21．According to Paragraph 2, Johnson suffered from _________.
A．loneliness B．unemployment C．repeated failures D．racial discrimination(歧视）
22．What was Song’s attitude towards Johnson’s invention?
A．Worried. B．Dissatisfied. C．Encouraged. D．Interested.
23．We know from the text that Johnson_____________.
A．wants to make green energy cheaper
B．will go on to sell toys in the near future
C．studies at Tulane and Tuskegee universities
D．has helped to put solar- power panels on the market
