1 / 55 句0 词已学
【阅读理解】Reading: The Loom and the Recorder
The loom had twelve wooden components, and Lin Yuehua could name each one in the local shorthand her grandmother had taught her.
She was 63, a weaver in a village outside Dali, and on a wet morning in March 2021 she found a stranger on her doorstep holding a digital recorder.
"I want to witness the last one," the visitor said.
His name was Gao Peng, 29, a musicologist from Kunming, and he had driven 340 kilometres on a hunch that a sound was about to disappear.
Lin was reluctant at first.
She was stubborn and superstitious, and she believed that recording a craft could induce its death.
Gao, patient and moderately frank, said he wanted to conserve the noise, not the cloth.
"Six hundred households wove here in 1985," he said.
"Now the statistics suggest fewer than nine."
She let him in.
For three days she let him sit near the loom, curious, silent, while her shuttle made its low, viscous rhythm, a breeze of dust rising with every stretch of the warp.
The machine, she said, had a signature and a moral weight; it demanded assistance from two hands and one foot, and it yielded roughly four metres of cloth a day.
By 2015 the village had begun to slide.
Factories in the east could print any costume in minutes; cheap cotton arrived in vast bundles; a single domestic appliance cost less than one month of her weaving.
Her son, Lin Qiang, 38, had gone to Shenzhen to work on an assembly line for aerospace parts, and he urged her continually to stop.
"The pursuit of an original pattern is futile," he told her.
"Nobody pays for a variant anymore."
The hostility between them was quiet but rigid.
She did not blame him.
Reliance on machines had become the orthodox premise of the whole locality.
Then came the deception.
In 2019 a city boutique leased the village's name, printed 8,000 banners with an "authentic" label, and sold a blend of synthetic fibre as hereditary craft.
Lin's neighbours, enthusiastic at first, endorsed the proposal.
She refused.
"This will swmap the market," she said, using an old verb that meant to flood.
When the boutique's chain collapsed in 2020, it left 40,000 yuan of unpaid wages and a bureaucracy of forms that no one could verify.
The aggravation did not abate.
It intensified.
The village's name was now associated with a forgery, and tourists, mostly recreational, stayed away.
Gao's recording became a substitute for the real thing.
A university in Shanghai authenticated 19 hours of it, embedded the files in a database, and used them to teach cognitive analysis of rhythm.
Lin received a fee of 3,000 yuan and a certificate.
She felt, for the first time, decapitated from her own hands.
The loom sat under a plastic sheet; the shrubs outside the window grew into a thick, navigable swamp of green.
She began to take pills for an infirmity she could not name, and her doctor, a compassionate woman of about 40, gave her a prescription and a compliment: "You have a remarkable imagination."
On a warm evening last June, Lin tried to teach her granddaughter, aged 11, to thread the shuttle.
The girl was quick but bored; she preferred the entertainment of a screen.
Lin's fingers still knew the gear and the crank, the delicate overlap of warp and weft.
"I suppose it ends here," she said, not sadly.
Gao arrived one last time to deposit a copy of the file.
He asked whether she would ever weave again.
She looked at the loom, then at the girl, then at the rain starting on the roof, and said nothing at all.
Questions
1. What is Gao Peng's profession?
A. A weaver from Dali B. A doctor from Shanghai C. A musicologist from Kunming D. A boutique owner from the city
2. What happened to the village's name after the boutique's chain collapsed in 2020?
A. It became famous for authentic craft. B. It was associated with a forgery. C. It was leased by a university. D. It attracted more tourists.
3. The word "swmap" in the passage is closest in meaning to:
A. flood B. decorate C. protect D. divide
4. Why did Lin feel "decapitated from her own hands" after receiving the fee and certificate?
A. She was proud of the university's recognition. B. She was physically injured by the loom. C. She was angry at her son for leaving. D. She felt her craft had been replaced by a recording.
5. What is the main idea of the passage?
A. The success of a university project on rhythm analysis. B. The loss of a traditional craft and its replacement by technology. C. The economic decline of a village in Dali. D. The conflict between a mother and her son.