고등학교 영어 독해와 작문 (NE능률 양현권) 연계 글

In late 1997, South Korea ran so short of foreign currency that its government had to ask the International Monetary Fund for emergency loans. For many families, the crisis raised an unfamiliar question: what could ordinary citizens do for a nation that was struggling under heavy debts? One answer took shape in January 1998, when a nationwide campaign invited people to bring gold from their homes so that it could be exported in exchange for dollars.

Citizens lined up at collection centers with wedding rings, the small rings that Korean children traditionally receive on their first birthdays, and other jewelry that they could hardly spare. Some athletes even handed over gold medals that they had won in competition. Each piece was examined by an appraiser, and its owner was to be repaid later in Korean won according to the exchange rate and the world price of gold. Over about three months, roughly 3.5 million people took part, and together they gathered more than 220 tons of gold.

The fact that so many households gave up possessions full of family memories shows how strongly people felt that the crisis belonged to all of them. Yet the gold could not rescue the economy by itself, since its value of roughly two billion dollars was small beside the sums that the country had borrowed. The fact that much of it was sold below the international price and refined by companies overseas has also drawn criticism. Without the participation of millions, however, those rings and medals would have remained scattered keepsakes in private drawers; gathered together, they became a public statement that the nation intended to recover as one.

An old basket weaver had three sons who quarreled every evening over whose work mattered most. The eldest, who cut and carried the willow, boasted that he could snap a branch as thick as his wrist. The middle son, who wove the baskets, claimed that his hands did the real work, while the youngest, who sold them at the market, insisted that without him, not a single basket would have been sold. One autumn evening, after an especially loud quarrel, the father asked the youngest to tie twelve willow rods together with a thin strip of bark.

He handed the bundle to the eldest and told him to break it. The eldest pressed it across his knee until his face turned red, but the rods only bent and sprang back. The middle son tried next, and then the youngest, but neither did any better. The father then untied the bark and divided the rods equally among his sons. Each son snapped his share with ease, and the youngest had broken all of his before the eldest reached his last rod.

"Each of you can break a single rod," the father said, "but none of you could break them while they were tied." The youngest frowned, puzzled by the fact that a thin strip of bark had made the rods unbreakable. "Why didn't you use a rope?" he asked. The father replied that he had chosen the weakest thing in the shed on purpose: what held his sons together did not need to be strong, as long as none of them untied it. Without that strip of bark, he added, the rods would have fallen apart at the eldest's first push. The following morning, the eldest carried the youngest's baskets to the market without being asked.