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1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上PART IIREADING COMPREHENSION (30 MIN)In this section there are four reading passages followed by a total of 20 multiple-choice questions. Read the passages and then mark your answers on your coloured answer sheet.TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years. (So does
2、 its name, officially changed in 2001 from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali. Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta.) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subwaya facility who
3、se spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitorsbut the hand-pulled rickshaw. Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa. For years the government has been
4、 talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian groundsprincipally on the ground that, as the mayor of Kolkata has often said, it is offensive to see “one man sweating and straining to pull another man.” But these days politicians also lament the impact of 6,000 hand-p
5、ulled rickshaws on a modern citys traffic and, particularly, on its image. “Westerners try to associate beggars and these rickshaws with the Calcutta landscape, but this is not what Calcutta stands for,” the chief minister of West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, said in a press conference in 2006.
6、“Our city stands for prosperity and development.” The chief ministerthe equivalent of a state governorwent on to announce that hand-pulled rickshaws soon would be banned from the streets of Kolkata.Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. (Actually, I saw almost no tourists in Kolkata, apart
7、 from the young backpackers on Sudder Street, in what used to be a red-light district and is now said to be the single place in the city where the services a rickshaw puller offers may include providing female company to a gentleman for the evening.) Its the people in the lanes who most regularly us
8、e rickshawsnot the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the ricksha
9、w puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafs or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. (One morning I saw a rickshaw puller take on a load o
10、f live chickenstied in pairs by the feet so they could be draped over the shafts and the folded back canopy and even the axle. By the time he trotted off, he was carrying about a hundred upside-down chickens.) The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are schoolchildren. Middle-class fa
11、milies contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains, and its drainage system doesnt need torrential rain to begin backing up. Residents who favor a touch of hyperbole say tha
12、t in Kolkata “if a stray cat pees, theres a flood.” During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldnt be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers waists. When its raining, the nor
13、mal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements
14、as prosperity and infrastructure. Among Indias 20 largest states, Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a couple hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their ricks
15、haws or in a deraa combination garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2.50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until youve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out o
16、f which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the ragpickers and the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.There are people in Kolkata, pa
