They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them. With little more than a pencil, a ruler and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday, calculated (计算) the track that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history—making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA and for decades afterwards, almost no one knew her name.

Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred strictly educated, extremely capable yet largely unrecognized women who, well before the modern feminist (女权) movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her sex that kept her long unsung. For some years at mid-century, the black women were forced to a double segregation (隔离). They were kept separate from the much large group of white women who in turn were segregated from the mathematicians and engineers.

Mrs. Johnson broke barriers at NASA. In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of black women who served as mathematicians for the space agency. Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” which was nominated (提名) for three Oscars, including Best Picture.

In 2017, NASA devoted a building in her honor. That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most celebrated of the computers” — “computers” being the term originally used to describe Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” were used in the 19th century to represent professional typists.

She “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space,” NASA's administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement on Monday, “even as she made huge steps that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human effort to explore space.”

As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her term at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was “a time when computers wore skirts."

【小题1】What is the first paragraph mainly about?

A．Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk.

B．Katherine Johnson’s contributions

C．The Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

D．Breakthroughs in moon exploration.

【小题2】Why were Mrs. Johnson described as “computers”?

A．She helped invent the computer.

B．She was NASA's human calculator.

C．She calculated the track with computers.

D．She was quite capable of using computers.

【小题3】What can we learn from Mrs. Johnson’s experience?

A．Change the world for the better.

B．Use knowledge to wipe out ignorance.

C．Don’t judge a person by his appearance.

D．Never be limited by the labels given by others.