题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
广东省清远市2018-2019学年高二下学期英语期末统考试卷
It's natural to think about what goes into producing the food in your daily lunch bag. But have you ever stopped to consider the production techniques behind the bag itself? At the center of it is a woman named Margaret Knight.
From her earliest years, Knight was a restless creator. In the article titled "TheEvolutionoftheGroceryBag", its writer mentions a few of her childhood projects. She was "famous for her kites", and "her sleds were the envy of the town's boys."
To support her mother, she took a job at a cotton factory when she was 12. That same year she invented a shuttle system which helped to prevent injury. At the time, she had no concept of patenting(得到……的专利权) her idea. What strengthened her place in history was her working experience at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. Here, instead of folding every paper bag by hand, Knight wondered if she might be able to make them cleanly and rapidly via an automated machine. The result was a working model of her elegant paper-folding machine. But this time, she wanted to go to the extra step and secure a patent on her creation, a brave move for a woman in the 19th century, when an extremely small percentage of patents were held by women.
Not only did Knight file for a patent, she bravely defended her ownership of the bag machine idea. A man named Charles Annan said the creation was his own, arguing no woman could be able to design such a machine. Knight fought a legal battle against him and handed Annan a courtroom(法庭) defeat by presenting her detailed hand-drawn blueprints. Finally, Knight received her rightful patent in 1871.
After making the machine, she continued to invent many other things like a paper feeding machine and a skirt protector. Knight, at the age of seventy, worked twenty hours a day on her 89th invention.
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