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【完形填空】Cloze: The Last Outpost
The alarm at Station 9 rang at 4:30 a.m., ten minutes before the scheduled broadcast.
Dr. Anna Reyes, a 36-year-old geologist, was already awake, (1) to the wind outside.
She had arrived in 2018 on a three-year contract, (2) to install sensors across 200 square kilometres of ice and rock.
The offer promised a training course in London every two years, a salary of 20,000 dollars a year, and a doctor on call.
What the agreement did not (3) was that the nearest hospital was 500 kilometres away.
For the first two years she told herself this was (4).
Then her joints began to ache in the cold, and she could not (5) arthritis from normal wear.
A doctor in the capital, (6) by video link, misdiagnosed it as stress.
She accepted the diagnosis because the (7) would force her to resign, and her work was not finished.
The station housed eight staff, all on the same schedule.
There was Tom, a 60-year-old technician who had once been a librarian in a small town before the funding (8).
He kept a record of every reading since 2005, handwritten, because the digital logger failed whenever the power (9).
And there was Kofi, 29, a Ghanaian anthropologist studying how isolation changes beliefs.
Kofi was easy-going in a way that made people uneasy.
Once, during a storm that lasted 40 hours, he said, 'You know what scares me? Not the wind. The idea that nobody out here is indifferent to us. They just forgot.'
Anna laughed, then stopped.
The line had (10).
By 2023 the funding had been cut by 40 per cent.
The ministry argued that the data was unnecessary, that satellite images could replace ground work, that the whole idea of a manned station belonged to the past.
Four of the eight were notified in March.
Anna watched the closure plan circulate as a mess of spreadsheets; she opposed it in three letters, none of which got a reply.
Consequently, the remaining four had to handle twice the work with half the equipment.
Tom's asthma worsened.
The backup generator failed in July.
They had to reduce power to the lab, which meant the samples thawed.
Five years of genetic material, gone.
'The distribution was unfair from the start,' Kofi said, not angrily.
He was developing something bigger, she could tell — a theory about waste and freedom, about who gets to abandon whom.
She was too tired to ask.
What happened next was not dramatic.
It was a slow accumulation, like sediment settling.
In September a rumour spread that the base would close by December.
No statement came.
Anna began to limp, favouring her left leg.
She had trouble sleeping; her stomach ached; she coughed blood twice and told no one.
She felt a deep unease — a sense that the safety she had been promised was an illusion, a high-wire act with no net.
She was 38.
She was pregnant.
She had not told anyone, because she could not predict how the news would be received, and there was no guide for this.
Her body was thin on the outside; inside, everything was being rebuilt.
She left on 5 December 2023, on the last ship before the ice.
She carried two hard drives, Tom's archive in a plastic folder, and a small gift Kofi had pressed into her hand — a tiny metal hive, he said, to remind her that life always finds a way to thrive in hard conditions.
The screen at the dock flashed a farewell message that disappeared 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 sending data nobody would collect: clear, exact, and completely useless.
Now, in a rented room 2,000 kilometres to the south, Anna is filing a formal complaint to restore the station's research permit.
The chances are slim.
Her son is one year old and has never seen snow.
Sometimes, at night, Anna opens the archive folder and reads Tom's handwriting — neat, small, determined — and she finds herself unable to throw it away.
The last entry, dated 4 December 2023, reads: 'Wind from the north. All instruments working. No sign of the storm.'
She has read it perhaps fifty times.
She still cannot decide whether it was a warning, a joke, or just weather.
Choices
(1) A. listened B. listen C. listening D. to listen
(2) A. hiring B. hire C. hired D. to hire
(3) A. say B. mention C. speak D. tell
(4) A. economy B. economic C. economical D. economics
(5) A. tell B. say C. separate D. distinguish
(6) A. consulted B. to consult C. consult D. consulting
(7) A. alternative B. alternation C. alternate D. alternating
(8) A. ran out of B. ran out C. run out D. running out
(9) A. failing B. failed C. fail D. fails
(10) A. lands B. land C. landed D. landing