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【阅读理解】Reading: The Quiet Hour
On the third Tuesday of October 2023, at 7:14 p.m., the lights in Kowloon City went out.
Not a flicker. Not a brownout. An absolute, city-block black.
Maya Chen, a 34-year-old aeronautics engineer, was standing in her 12th-floor kitchen, holding a glass of water she could no longer see.
Her first thought was not fear but irritation: her phone was at 4 percent, and she had a seminar to attend online.
She fumbled for a candle, a relic from a previous blackout, and lit it.
The outage lasted 43 hours.
It spread across three districts and affected roughly 180,000 residents.
The official cause, released two weeks later, cited a cascading failure in a substation built in 1987, a dinosaur of a structure that had never been upgraded.
The report used words like inadequate and incompatible.
Maya read it twice.
She had spent her career designing systems that were durable, rigorously tested.
How had the backbone of an entire zone become so vulnerable?
She began to investigate.
She interviewed a lineman named Kwok, 58, who had worked the grid for 31 years.
He told her, over a bowl of cereal in his cramped flat, that the utility had skipped maintenance for a decade.
"They gamble on the weather," he said. "And they lose."
Maya's obsession grew.
She compiled data from 17 public utilities, compared their retention of spare parts, their migration to renewable microgrids.
Her findings were dispiriting: only 12 percent of the city's substations had been retrofitted since 2015.
The rest relied on components that were extinct in the market.
She submitted a report to the municipal council.
The reception was cool.
An executive from the utility called her "pretentious" and "disruptive."
A legislative aide warned that her argument could jeopardise a pending loan for a new coal plant.
Maya felt a dizziness she couldn't attribute to the candle smoke.
She was not a politician. She was a person who fixed things.
What haunted her was not the blackout itself. It was the psychological aftertaste.
Her neighbour, a 22-year-old student named Leo, had told her that during those 43 hours, he had felt an odd calm — no notifications, no clamour, no electronic invasion.
He had read a book by candlelight and slept nine hours.
"I want to plant a garden," he said. "But then the lights came back."
Maya realised that the grid's failure had exposed a deeper fracture: a civilization that could not abide silence.
She began to envisage a different kind of intervention — not a new substation, but a voluntary, seasonal blackout. A therapy for the perceptual system.
Her proposal, published as a short tome on urban resilience, triggered a predictable backlash.
Critics called it "a romantic whim," a "suicidal" idea for hospitals and data centres.
But a small group of counsellors, teachers and one retired astronaut contacted her.
They met monthly in a hallowed, dusty seminar room above a noodle shop.
They did not condone a total shutdown.
Instead, they recommended a three-hour, monthly, neighbourhood-level pause: no screens, no artificial light, no engines.
They called it "the quiet hour."
By June 2024, six districts had signed on.
Participation was voluntary.
The first evening, 4,000 households joined.
Maya stood on her balcony and watched the city dim — storey by storey, block by block.
A boy on a rooftop shouted something she couldn't hear.
She smiled.
Then she went inside, lit a candle, and waited for the grid to come back, wondering if it ever really needed to.
Questions
1. What was the official cause of the blackout in Kowloon City?
A. A cyberattack on the city's power network. B. A shortage of spare parts in the market. C. A cascading failure in an old substation. D. A decision to test a new microgrid system.
2. What does the word "extinct" mean in the sentence "The rest relied on components that were extinct in the market"?
A. No longer available for purchase. B. Widely used and popular. C. Recently upgraded and improved. D. illegally imported from abroad.
3. Why did Maya's report receive a cool reception from the municipal council?
A. It was based on data from only one utility company. B. It proposed a plan that was too expensive to implement. C. It was written without consulting any engineers. D. It threatened a loan for a new coal plant.
4. What can be inferred about Leo's experience during the blackout?
A. He was angry at the utility for the outage. B. He felt anxious without his phone and couldn't sleep. C. He spent the time helping neighbours with repairs. D. He enjoyed the quiet and wanted to keep some of it.
5. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. An engineer exposes corruption in the utility company. B. A community rejects technology and returns to candlelight. C. A city's power grid is too old and needs immediate replacement. D. A woman turns a blackout into a movement for voluntary quiet.