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【完形填空】Cloze: The River's Silent Warning
Liu Yan returned to Dongtan after fifteen years away, and what struck her first was the (1) of the old market street.
The diesel engines and shouting vendors had gone, replaced by brown water that crawled past the second-floor windows.
Her grandmother, Zhou, was 84 and refused to leave the house where she had buried three husbands.
She held a photocopy of her land certificate (2) her chest as if it were a shield.
'I have spent 36 years at the clinic on the north bank,' she said. 'I (3) here all my life, and I will not run now.'
Liu Yan, an environmental scientist, had come back from overseas to evacuate her.
She (4) the data to her grandmother: the river's sediment load had multiplied eightfold since 2015, and the landfill upstream held 2.4 million tonnes of industrial waste, some of it hazardous.
The forecasts were (5), but Grandma Zhou's conviction was almost religious.
To her, the house was not property but an inalienable connection to her ancestors.
Leaving meant (6).
Their standoff lasted nine days.
On the third morning, a neighbour's cervical surgery was cancelled because the ambulance could not cross the submerged route.
On the fifth, the power failed.
Liu Yan watched her grandmother's hands tremble as she lit a candle whose flame threw a hypnotic glare on the wet wall.
'You calculate risk,' the old woman said. 'I calculate love.'
That night, Liu Yan stopped (7).
She simply began packing: photographs, a stainless steel tea kit, her grandfather's facsimile of a 1978 expedition map.
Grandma Zhou did not resist.
She only asked to take one more thing: a chunk of brick from the doorway, still bearing the faint decoration her husband had carved.
By the time they reached the resettlement camp, 11,400 people had been moved from four districts.
The camp was eco-friendly on paper, but the reality was congested and (8).
Tents jostled against each other; the sanitary arrangements aggravated everyone.
Liu Yan recognised several former students among the volunteers, all of them overwhelmed and underpaid.
A supervisor named Chen Wei told her the relocation budget had been cut by 30 per cent, and the shortfall had to come from local funds.
'We do what we can,' he said.
'But the legislation was written for floods, not for this slow poison.'
She noticed his shin was bandaged; he had fallen while helping an elderly man down a muddy slope.
The incident was minor, yet it seemed symbolic of a larger failure.
What troubled Liu Yan most was not the flood but the disenchantment that followed.
In the camp, elderly residents sat absent-eyed, their routine destroyed.
A scholar from the provincial university arrived to conduct an appraisal of their mental health; his preliminary findings were unsatisfactory.
Rates of depression among the displaced were three times the national average.
Children showed linguistic delays and irrational fears.
'The old people are grieving,' the scholar said. 'Not for a house. For a world.'
Liu Yan began to suspect that her own scientific training had been too superficial, too instrumental.
She had tried to alleviate suffering with numbers; she had forgotten that grief does not (9) statistics.
Six months later, she returned to the site with a research team.
The water had receded, leaving a toxic stain across the pasture.
Excavation revealed that the landfill's lining had failed years earlier, a fact the original environmental evaluation had failed to anticipate.
The company responsible had been profitable throughout; its directors had since repatriated their dividends abroad.
Liu Yan stood on a levee, staring at the ruins.
Her grandmother, now in a city apartment, had stopped speaking of home.
The brick sat on her windowsill, a small, mute relic.
'We were not ignorant,' Liu Yan wrote in her field notebook. 'We were merely (10).'
Behind her, a flock of herons rose from the shallows, their wings catching the last light, and for a moment she could not decide whether the river had taken something from them or simply moved on.
Choices
(1) A. silence B. noise C. chaos D. crowd
(2) A. with B. against C. on D. by
(3) A. am living B. live C. have lived D. lived
(4) A. presented B. showed C. explained D. demonstrated
(5) A. stark B. mild C. promising D. vague
(6) A. loyalty B. surrender C. betrayal D. escape
(7) A. to argue B. arguing C. argue D. argued
(8) A. bright B. bleak C. spacious D. comfortable
(9) A. observe B. obey C. respect D. follow
(10) A. indifferent B. ignorant C. late D. careless