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【阅读理解】Reading: The Lease and the Mine
The first stone hit the corrugated roof at 4:40 a.m., and Tenzin Dolma was already awake.
She had been awake for months, ever since the survey team drove their sleek white pickup past her family's pasture on the Tibetan plateau and stopped at the junction where the old trade road splits toward the glacier.
Tenzin, 34, keeps 62 yaks and 40 sheep; her younger brother Lobsang, 22, had signed an apprenticeship with a mining consortium the previous autumn, lured by wages of 4,800 yuan a month.
The company's consultant had been bold in the village meeting: the ore beneath the ridge was worth 900 million yuan, enough, he said, to refresh every household and repay every loan.
A few elders voiced an enquiry. Most simply nodded. The vote was 71 to 9.
That was in 2019. By 2021 the road had been widened, the first trucks had begun to barge through at night, and the stream below the camp ran grey.
Tenzin's herd began to lose weight. A vet from the county seat, a reserved woman named Dr. Qiao, tested the water and found particulate levels four times the legal threshold.
She cited the figures in a report; the report was shelved. Tenzin learned the word depletion from her, and the word chronic, and thought constantly about her grandmother's biography of the valley, a thin handwritten booklet describing grass so thick it clutched at your boots.
That grass had gone. In its place: dust, tyre tracks, a single electrical pole that hummed all night.
Lobsang came home at the spring festival, his hands scratched raw, his fatigue visible. "You can't fight a certificate," he told her, half joking, and she could hear the stammer of shame under it.
He described the tunnels, the pumps, the way dust made the workers' voices harsh by noon. He had been asked to sign a waiver. He had signed. Tenzin did not congratulate him, and did not taunt him either. She merely asked whether he had seen any fish in the river. He said no.
What followed was not dramatic. It was spasmodic: a petition here, a WeChat group there, a reporter who came, took photographs, and never published.
Twice the council sent delegates to intercept the villagers before they reached the county office. Once, a security officer in plain clothes tried to infiltrate a meeting by pretending to be a prospective buyer of yaks. He was recognised within ten minutes.
The village's legitimacy in the debate, meanwhile, kept shrinking: permits were valid, taxes were paid, the mine was sanctioned. In the language of the paperwork, the herders were merely residents in the way.
Tenzin felt her own words turn into jargon whenever she spoke to officials, as if the closer she came to the truth, the less intelligible she became.
She decided on a different approach. If the law would not listen to a herder, it might listen to a lease. She located the original 1984 grazing allocation document in a locked cabinet at the township office, photographed all nine pages, and mailed copies to a lawyer in Xining who specialised in land disputes.
The lawyer, a former tutor of hers from a winter course, agreed to take the case for 6,000 yuan and to collaborate with a university laboratory that could perform an independent water test.
The results came back in July 2023: arsenic at 0.09 mg/L, lead at 0.04, both above the national standard. It was a small, factual victory. It did not close the mine.
What it did was slower. The county froze two new permits, and a national bulletin mentioned the watershed by name. Tenzin was interviewed by three journalists; one rendition of her testimony reached 400,000 readers.
But the herd was down to 38 yaks, and the shallow wells near the camp had begun to yield a metallic flavour that even boiled tea could not hide.
Lobsang quit the mine in 2024 after a tunnel collapse injured two men, and came home with a cough and a scar. Dr. Qiao, whose contract was not renewed, now works in a clinic 300 km east.
The glacier above the valley, which once fed the stream all summer, has retreated 1.4 km since 1998; the measurement is exact, and no one disputes it, and nothing about it is reversible by argument.
On a clear October morning, Tenzin walked the last unblemished stretch of pasture, about two hectares, and let the yaks out.
They moved slowly, heads low, and the smallest calf skampered sideways for no reason at all, the way calves do, and then stopped. She stood there a long time with her hand on the fence wire. The trucks would start again at six.
Questions
1. What was the result of the village vote in 2019?
A. 71 to 9 in favor of the mining project. B. 71 to 9 against the mining project. C. 9 to 71 against the mining project. D. 9 to 71 in favor of the mining project.
2. What did Dr. Qiao find when she tested the water?
A. Particulate levels four times the legal threshold. B. The water was safe for drinking. C. Arsenic at 0.09 mg/L and lead at 0.04 mg/L. D. The water had a metallic flavour.
3. As used in the passage, the word "spasmodic" most nearly means:
A. happening in sudden, irregular bursts. B. continuous and steady. C. planned and organized. D. violent and destructive.
4. What can be inferred about the effect of Tenzin's legal action?
A. It caused the company to compensate the villagers. B. It permanently closed the mine. C. It led to some positive outcomes but did not solve the main problem. D. It had no impact at all.
5. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. The challenges of working in a mine. B. The history of a Tibetan village's grazing rights. C. A herder's struggle against a mining company and its limited results. D. The importance of water testing in mining areas.