The Maths Game: exercises

Fill the gaps

Choose the missing word for each gap. The words are in the box.

One day Choose…AbrilAdvisoryAmericancalculationmathematicianNASAStatestalent notices a smell of sadness in the air and follows it to a modest house in the United Choose…AbrilAdvisoryAmericancalculationmathematicianNASAStatestalent, where the Colemans live with their four children. Katherine, the youngest, has a special Choose…AbrilAdvisoryAmericancalculationmathematicianNASAStatestalent for maths, but she is a girl with dark skin at a time when both are hard barriers to get past. Abril decides that talent must not be wasted. She leaves a notebook beside Katherine with a sentence she has started, and the two of them begin a game: one writes the beginning, the other finishes it. Page by page the notebook tells Katherine's future: a university where teachers help her shine, teaching at a small school, rude looks in a mostly white city, and a job as a human calculator at the National Choose…AbrilAdvisoryAmericancalculationmathematicianNASAStatestalent Committee for Aeronautics, which later becomes Choose…AbrilAdvisoryAmericancalculationmathematicianNASAStatestalent. There she has to fight to attend meetings and to sign her own reports. Where will the game take her? The story is inspired by Katherine Johnson, whose calculations helped launch the first Choose…AbrilAdvisoryAmericancalculationmathematicianNASAStatestalent space flights.