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【阅读理解】Reading: The Woman Who Measured the Machines
The first thing Chen Yulan did at 6:40 each morning was inhale the smell of hot glue and machine oil.
She was 34, a line chief at a factory in Dongguan that made instrument panels for spacecraft consoles, or so the invoice said.
Twelve years she had stood at the same bench.
Twelve years of the same auditory grind.
In March 2019 a client from Shenzhen brought a recommendation: swap 60 of the 200 workers for robotic arms.
The maths was blunt.
Each arm cost 180,000 yuan, worked 22 hours a day, and never asked for a pension.
Yulan's committee voted.
She did not disobey; she merely asked for one extra shift to teach the older women to operate the new machines.
Permission came back negative.
By August the floor held 74 employees versus 200.
The vacancy rate for human hands, someone joked, was now 63 percent and rising.
What followed was a specific kind of nightmare.
The arms could not tell a slippery panel from a solid one.
They would bump, scrape, stack, and occasionally pulverise a batch worth 40,000 yuan in nine seconds.
Yulan employed a trick: she glued a tiny worm of copper wire to each cylinder so the sensor could identify the edge.
It was inventive.
It was also, apparently, plagiarism of a patent filed in Osaka in 2016.
A defendant in a libel case two provinces away had already been discredited for saying so.
She was not a coward.
She was tired.
To commute from her rented flat took 95 minutes, and the bus was always congested, bodies jostling for a handrail like reptiles in captivity.
Her daughter, 9, drew pictures of a mother who was barely home.
Yulan would dash in at 22:10, hug the girl, contemplate the cold rice, then simulate sleep.
Then came the second wave.
In 2021 the firm announced expansion into aviation parts, an unparalleled leap, the chancellor of the group called it.
Twenty-two of the remaining 74 got notices.
Yulan survived, but her wage was skewed downward by 18 percent because her bonus now depended on output per arm, not per person.
She began to keep an anecdote book — small, cosy, bound in red — recording every malfunction, every fluctuation in the yield curve, every sore shoulder.
Stack the numbers long enough, she thought, and they become an argument.
She was right.
In 2023 a tribunal in Guangzhou heard her evidence: 411 incidents, 9 catastrophic failures, one near-ejection of a worker from a platform.
The company's own data had been buried in a folder labelled static.
The judge, a woman of 51, ruled that the firm must fund retraining and pay 260,000 yuan in compensation.
It was a striking outcome.
It was also, for Yulan, the end.
Her contract was not renewed.
The union sent a card.
She wept once, then stopped.
Now she runs a small workshop above a noodle shop, six sewing machines, eight women, all over 40, sewing cotton bags for a reputable brand that appeals to students.
Monthly gross: 31,000 yuan.
Rent: 9,000.
Her daughter, 15, wants to study geometry and design spacecraft.
Yulan laughs at that.
Some evenings she still hears the old floor — the hum, the alarm, the rhythm — and she will stand at the window, watching the delivery bikes circle the block, and wonder how many of the 74 were ever truly needed, and whether the tribunal's ruling changed a single thing for anyone except her.
Questions
1. What was Chen Yulan's job at the factory in Dongguan before the changes?
A. A line chief in charge of a production line. B. A machine operator running robotic arms. C. A quality inspector checking instrument panels. D. A union representative handling worker complaints.
2. Why did Yulan's wage drop by 18 percent after she survived the second wave of cuts?
A. Because she was moved to a lower-paid position. B. Because the company reduced all workers' base pay. C. Because her bonus depended on output per arm, not per person. D. Because she was fined for the patent issue.
3. What does the word "pulverise" in the passage most likely mean?
A. To carefully arrange in layers. B. To crush into small pieces or powder. C. To measure with precision instruments. D. To polish until smooth and shiny.
4. What can be inferred about the tribunal's ruling from the last paragraph?
A. It forced the company to rehire all 74 workers. B. It led to major improvements for all workers at the factory. C. It was overturned on appeal by the company. D. It mainly benefited Yulan personally but changed little for others.
5. Which of the following best serves as a title for the passage?
A. The Legal Battle Over a Copper Wire Patent B. How One Woman Documented Automation's Human Cost C. The Rise of Robotic Arms in Dongguan Factories D. A Factory Worker's Twelve-Year Fight Against Machines