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【阅读理解】Reading: The Last Entry
The whistle at Outpost 7 blew at 4:40 a.m., twelve minutes before the scheduled ceremony.
Mei Lin, a 34-year-old atmospheric scientist, was already awake in her bunk, listening.
She had come here in 2019 on a two-year stint, hired to set up sensors across 180 square kilometres of gravel and scrub.
The pitch was simple: measure how a regional ecosystem breathes.
Her contract promised a refresher course in Shanghai every eighteen months, a salary of 19,000 yuan a month, and a physician on call.
What the memorandum did not mention was that the nearest hospital was 460 kilometres away, reachable only by a supply vessel that came once a fortnight.
For the first three years she told herself this was economical.
Then her hands began to stiffen in the cold, and she could not distinguish arthritis from ordinary wear.
A physician in Urumqi, consulted by stereo link, misjudged it as depression.
She accepted the diagnosis because the alternative would force her to resign, and her ambition was not finished yet.
The outpost housed nine staff, all on the same roster.
There was Old Zhou, a 58-year-old technician who had once been a lexicographer's assistant in Harbin before the money ran out.
He kept an archive of every reading since 2007, handwritten, because the digital logger failed whenever the turbine iced over.
And there was Kwame, 27, a Ghanaian anthropologist studying how isolation reshapes belief.
Kwame was easy-going in a way that unsettled people.
Once, during a dust storm that lasted 41 hours, he said, 'You know what terrifies me? Not the wind. The notion that nobody out here is indifferent to us. They just forgot.'
Mei Lin laughed, then stopped.
The line had landed.
By 2024 the funding had been cut by 38 per cent.
The ministry argued that the data was redundant, that satellite imaging could substitute for ground work, that the whole concept of a manned outpost belonged to a traditional era.
Four of the nine were notified in March.
Mei Lin watched the redevelopment plan circulate as a jumble of spreadsheets; she opposed it in three memoranda, none of which got a response.
Consequently, the remaining five had to juggle twice the work with half the equipment.
Old Zhou's asthma worsened.
The reserve generator failed in June.
They had to shave power to the laboratory, which meant the samples thawed.
Six years of genetic material, gone.
'The distribution was uneven from the start,' Kwame said, not angrily.
He was formulating something larger, she could tell — a theory about wastage and liberty, about who gets to abandon whom.
She was too tired to ask.
What happened next was not dramatic.
It was a slow accumulation, like gravel settling.
In August a rumour spread that the base would close by December.
No statement came.
Mei Lin began to limp, favouring her right leg.
She had difficulty sleeping; her intestines ached; she spat blood twice and mentioned it to no one.
She felt an inherent uneasiness — a sense that the security she had been promised was theatrical, a trapeze act with no net.
She was 36.
She was pregnant.
She had not told anyone, because she could not predict how the news would be received, and there was no tutorial for this.
The exterior of her body was slim; inside, everything was being rebuilt.
She left on 2 December 2024, on the last vessel before the ice.
She carried two hard drives, Zhou's archive in a plastic folder, and a trinket Kwame had pressed into her hand — a small tin hive, he said, to remind her that fauna always finds a way to flourish in limited conditions.
The screen at the dock flickered a farewell message that expired before she finished reading it.
She did not cry.
She was too anxious for that.
She kept thinking about the sensors still out there, blinking in the dark, still transmitting data nobody would collect: crisp, precise, and entirely useless.
Now, in a rented room 1,900 kilometres to the south, Mei Lin is filing a formal complaint to reinstate the outpost's research license.
The odds are poor.
Her daughter is eleven months old and has never seen snow.
Sometimes, at night, Mei Lin opens the archive folder and reads Zhou's handwriting — neat, small, stubborn — and she finds herself unable to throw it away.
The last entry, dated 1 December 2024, reads: 'Wind from the north. All instruments functioning. No sign of the storm.'
She has read it perhaps forty times.
She still cannot decide whether it was a warning, a joke, or just weather.
Questions
1. What was the distance from Outpost 7 to the nearest hospital?
A. 180 kilometres B. 1,900 kilometres C. 460 kilometres D. 41 kilometres
2. What happened to the genetic samples in June 2024?
A. They were moved to a new laboratory. B. They thawed because power was cut to the lab. C. They were destroyed by a dust storm. D. They were sent to Urumqi for analysis.
3. In the passage, the phrase 'the line had landed' most nearly means that the line was ______.
A. difficult to understand B. meant as a joke C. quickly forgotten D. deeply affecting
4. What can be inferred about Mei Lin from the passage?
A. She still hopes to restore the outpost's research. B. She never opposed the funding cuts. C. She was eager to leave the outpost. D. She left the outpost before the funding cuts.
5. Which of the following best serves as the title for the passage?
A. The Storm Warning B. Life at Outpost 7 C. The Last Entry D. A Scientist's Ambition