新GRE写作名人素材库：林肯_GRE写作

新GRE写作名人素材库：林肯

　　They began building a better home and clearing the land for planting. They were making progress when, in the summer of 1818, a terminal disease known as milk sickness struck the region, afflicting Lincoln s great uncle and great aunt first, then tragically, his mother. On the shoulders of Abraham s 12-year-old sister, Sarah, fell the burden of caring for the household; the home was soon reduced to near squalor.

　　The next winter Abraham s father returned to Kentucky and brought back a second wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, a widow with three children. Abraham learned to love her and in later years referred to her as my angel mother. As time passed, the region where the Lincolns lived grew in population, and James Gentry s little store became a trading center around which the village of Gentryville grew. There Abraham spent much of his spare time, early showing a marked talent for storytelling and mimicry. He grew tall and strong, and his father often hired him out to work for neighbors. Through this came the chance, with Gentry s son Allen, to take a flatboat of produce down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleansincoln s first sight of anything other than frontier simplicity.

　　Meanwhile Lincoln s father had again moved his family to a new home in Illinois, where he built a cabin on the Sangamon River. This was open prairie country, but the abundant trees along the streams supplied the rails to fence their fields. Young Lincoln, already skilled with his ax, was soon splitting rails, not only for the Lincoln farm but for others as well.