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【阅读理解】Reading: The Last Shift at Diamond Hill
The siren at Diamond Hill roared at 6:40 a.m., and Zhou Lan knew before the loudspeaker crackled that something had gone wrong.
She had worked the nursery line for eleven years, feeding cloth through the pad machine, checking the flap of every diaper before it dropped into the packing chute.
The factory sat at the edge of a county road in Fujian, a grimy block of concrete and rusted shutters.
In 2018 it employed 1,240 people. By last March, the payroll listed 311.
Zhou, 44, was one of the last hires still standing at the intermediate station, and she had begun to resent the quiet.
A quiet line meant orders had dried up. A quiet line meant the company was guzzling its own reserves.
"Attentive," her supervisor, Chen Wei, used to tell the new recruits. "You miss one defect, the whole shipment gets smeared."
He was 52, gregarious in a way that wore people out, and he had a grudge against the head office that he never quite hid.
What corrupted the plant was not one decision but a sequence of lenient ones.
In 2016, management signed a commercial contract with a distributor in Lagos; the margin looked incredible.
To meet it, they squandered money on antiquated equipment, reasoning that the overseas market would not notice a shallow difference in absorbency.
They were wrong. A 2019 audit found that 18 percent of exports failed the leak test.
The company tried to rectify the defect by adding a cheap layer of pulp, which only made the product feel like paper.
Customers complained. The brand lost its credit with three major retailers.
Chen Wei showed Zhou a confidential memo in which a vice-president wrote that the company should "gently diverge" from the baby-care sector and reorient toward industrial wipes.
Zhou read it twice. "They are selling us," she said. Chen did not answer. He simply spat on the floor and walked toward the loading bay.
The turn came in October, when a group from Shanghai arrived in two black motor cars.
They walked the floor in sanitary boot covers and goggles, taking photographs.
One of them, a woman in her thirties with an animated manner, asked Zhou how long it took to acclimatize a new worker to the pad machine.
"Three weeks," Zhou said. "Maybe four." The woman nodded and wrote something down.
That evening, Chen told the crew that the plant would be dismantled by June.
The machinery would be shipped to a facility in Vietnam. Sixty workers would be offered transfers; the rest would receive a severance of 4,200 yuan per year of service, capped at 84,000.
Zhou did the arithmetic in her head. Eleven years. Fifty thousand, six hundred.
It was not enough to cover her mother's allergy medication and her son's tuition in the same year.
She felt a vicious heat behind her eyes, but she did not cry. Not there.
The final months were episodic and strange. The company kept producing, but the quality control grew slack.
Workers began to smuggle out small items: a roll of tape, a box of gloves, a device for measuring thickness.
Zhou did not join them. She had a modest asset, a two-room flat she and her husband had bought in 2013, and she did not wish to lose it.
Instead she began to dwell on the significance of what was vanishing.
The nursery line had been her first real job. She had learned to appreciate the precision of a well-cut pad, the satisfaction of a shipment that passed inspection.
Now she watched a junior worker, a juvenile delinquent by everyone's account, pour oil into a gearbox and laugh.
The boy was bored, not wicked. Zhou understood that. She also understood that the plant had become a place where people no longer bothered to pretend.
On the last day, 17 June, the sky was the colour of old metal.
Chen Wei stood by the main gate and handed each worker a red envelope with the severance slip inside. He shook hands.
He said the same thing to everyone: "Take care of your health."
Zhou received her envelope and walked the length of the empty floor one last time.
The pad machine had been unbolted from its base; a rectangle of clean concrete marked where it had stood.
She ran her palm over the cold floor. Outside, a truck was already loading the first crates.
Somebody had left a pair of goggles on a windowsill. Zhou picked them up, considered them, and put them back.
Then she walked toward the gate, where Chen Wei was still shaking hands, and the siren, which had not sounded for three weeks, suddenly let out a short, feeble note, as if testing whether anyone was still listening.
Questions
1. What was Zhou Lan's job at the Diamond Hill factory?
A. She managed the payroll and hiring records. B. She drove a truck for the loading bay. C. She worked on the nursery line, checking diapers. D. She supervised the quality control team.
2. According to the passage, why did the company's products fail the leak test in 2019?
A. The workers were careless and missed defects. B. The company used antiquated equipment to meet the contract. C. The distributor in Lagos returned the shipment. D. The company added a cheap layer of pulp to the product.
3. What does the word "acclimatize" in paragraph 6 most nearly mean?
A. To train someone to operate a machine. B. To become accustomed to a new situation. C. To move to a different country. D. To measure the thickness of a product.
4. What can be inferred about Zhou Lan from the passage?
A. She was happy that the factory was closing down. B. She planned to move to Vietnam with the machinery. C. She felt the severance pay was insufficient for her family's needs. D. She stole small items from the factory like other workers.
5. Which of the following best serves as the title for the passage?
A. How to Calculate Severance Pay B. The Last Days of a Diaper Factory C. The Rise of a Factory in Fujian D. A Contract with Lagos That Failed