1 / 54 句0 词已学
【完形填空】Cloze: The Aquarium on the Plateau
Ma Yulan heard the pump (1) at 4:40 a.m. from her cot behind the receptionist desk.
By dawn, the basement chamber of the aquarium had gone (2).
She was 34, a former ecology student from a rural county outside Xining, and she had spent six years (3) this place alive.
Twelve thousand litres of artificial seawater, two hundred and forty fish, and a single, fairly elderly sturgeon (4) Old Chen.
Her job, according to the contract, was maintenance; her job, according to her, was keeping a promise she had made (5) her father.
He had once told her that water was the only honest thing on the plateau.
The aquarium sat at 2,260 metres, on a stretch of terrain that had been grassland for centuries and was now largely (6).
Visitors came for the novelty — a plush blue fantasy of coral and reefs in the middle of a dry highland.
They took photographs, bought tickets at 80 yuan, and left.
What they did not see was the daily (7) of keeping the tanks insulated against a brutal winter, the successive loads of salt hauled up by truck, and the electricity invoice that had tripled since 2019.
Ma had taken out three loans, (8) 460,000 yuan, and had already missed the second installment.
The bank's letters arrived in a uniform format, each one slightly more explicit than the last.
Then, in late spring, the water in the reservoir dropped below the intake pipe.
The drought was (9).
It did not announce itself; it crept.
Ma monitored the gauge each morning and watched the needle sway.
She tried to improvise: a detour pipe, a compact pump borrowed from a nearby greenhouse, and a ration of fresh water that she personally carried in two silver buckets.
The fish began to die anyway.
The sturgeon survived, but the rest — the coral, the smaller species, the larvae she had once hatched in a plastic tub — did not.
A colleague, a young internist named Tashi, 26, suggested they unload the survivors into a river 40 kilometres away.
Ma refused, saying the river had its own chemistry and would poison them.
What followed was a scuffle of small humiliations.
The insurance company declined the claim, (10) a clause about neglect.
Statistically, the aquarium's revenue had fallen 71 percent in four years.
Local officials, keen to promote tourism, offered a subsidy of 15,000 yuan — nominal, insulting.
Ma began to advertise on short-video platforms, filming herself in a faded uniform, teasing the audience with the idea that a fish tank could survive on a plateau where rainfall had dropped by a fifth since her childhood.
The videos drew 300,000 views and almost no customers.
Her visitor count hovered around eleven a day.
She felt the familiar, destructive pull of a fantasy: that if she just persisted, if she just held on, the water would return.
The water did not return.
In August, the pump failed for good.
Ma and Tashi drained the tank over two days, and the smell — a mixture of salt, decay, and something caustic — hung in the chamber for weeks.
Old Chen was released into a pond belonging to a Buddhist monastery, where an amateur monk with a degree in agriculture promised to feed him.
The remaining equipment was scrapped.
The building now houses a small exhibition on celestial observation, funded by a federation of schools.
Children come to look at telescopes instead of fish.
Ma works as a consultant for a company that designs artificial wetlands — a job she describes as feasible and meaningless.
She still keeps the failed pump in her apartment, next to a photograph of her father.
When I last called her, she was standing on the roof of the old aquarium, looking east towards the mountains.
The wind was picking up.
Somewhere beneath her, in a concrete basin that no longer contains anything, a single valve was still ticking, counting out a measure of water that had not existed for months.
Choices
(1) A. stopping B. stop C. to stop D. stopped
(2) A. silently B. silent C. silence D. silencing
(3) A. kept B. keep C. keeping D. to keep
(4) A. naming B. name C. named D. names
(5) A. with B. for C. at D. to
(6) A. dusty B. dusting C. dust D. dusted
(7) A. manoeuvre B. manoeuvring C. manoeuvred D. manoeuvres
(8) A. totalled B. total C. totalling D. totals
(9) A. insidiousness B. insidious C. insidiousness D. insidiously
(10) A. cites B. cited C. cite D. citing