[originaltext] Good afternoon, everyone. I can’t tell you how honored I am t

Good afternoon, everyone. I can’t tell you how honored I am to share my experiences as one of only a handful of women today running a major global corporation.
    I was offered the job as CEO of Avon four years ago, and it has certainly been an experience of a lifetime for me ever since. We’ve had a spectacular success, modernizing everything about the company from top to bottom.
     [16]As I reflect on my rapid rise to the top as one of the few women running a major global corporation, I have found myself thinking a great deal about my Chinese heritage and how enormously fortunate I am to have been given this very precious gift.
    I was raised in a traditional Chinese family where achievement was not demanded, but expected. My father, born in Hong Kong, was a successful architect. My mother, born in Shanghai, was the first female chemical engineer in her graduating class at the University of Toronto in Canada. [17]They arrived in America not speaking a word of English, but through hard work, both were able to fulfill their full potential, and their success has set a wonderful example for me.
    My parents were always, and continue to be today, the single biggest influence in my life. [18]They raised my brother and me with a respect for the values and traditions of our Chinese heritage, yet also with an unwavering commitment to bring us up with all the opportunities for higher education and a desire to prepare us to adapt to American society and to succeed in this world of great change.
    My brother and I were given all the opportunities of our American friends—the same schools, the same tennis lessons, the same piano teachers... but we had the wonderful advantage in my mind of a cultural heritage that we were always taught to be proud of. Mom and Dad always wanted us to be proud of being Chinese. We grew up believing that being Chinese was the greatest advantage in life; in our house, everything important in life came from China, was invented in China, owing all to the Chinese.
    When I first became CEO, a famous American television journalist interviewed my dad and asked him if he always knew I would be successful in business. [19]No, he said, quite to the contrary, he worried for years that raising me to be a respectful Chinese daughter would hinder my ability to compete in a world with what he considered the aggressive, cut-throat traits of typical American CEOs. In fact, he passed on a letter to me that I kept, translated from Chinese to English, in my desk drawer...
16. What does the speaker mainly talk about in the speech?
17. What has set a wonderful example for the speaker?
18. What can we learn about the speaker’s parents?
19. What is the common characteristic of a typical American CEO according to the speaker’s father?