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【完形填空】Cloze: The Sledge That Wouldn't Move
Anders Voss stood in the minus 38 degree air and swore quietly. Two hundred kilometres from the nearest settlement, his right hand had stopped (1) him three days earlier.
Rewind to 2016. Anders had spent eleven years moving cargo for a firm in Tromso, a job that (2) exact timing and a mastery of paperwork.
Then a routine medical check produced a statistical anomaly: early-onset nerve damage, possibly hereditary. His doctor used the word progressive. Anders heard the word impossible. He resigned within the month, sold his flat, and (3) to dedicate what mobility he had left to a winter traverse of the Finnmark plateau, a route he had first skied at nineteen.
Preparation (4) two years. He amassed sponsors, secured a donation of lightweight equipment worth 180,000 kroner, and assembled a crew of three.
The team (5) Marta Lindqvist, a physiotherapist specialising in nerve rehabilitation, and two brothers, Peder and Nils Haugen.
Marta was blunt from the start. "You will lose sensation in stages," she told him. "First the fingertips. Then grip. When the grip goes, you stop. Not negotiate. Stop." Anders nodded, and said nothing, which she later learned was his way of (6) any instruction he found inconvenient.
The crossing commenced on 4 January 2019. For eleven days the weather was almost kind — long blue hours, hard snow, a lull in the wind that felt like a truce.
Anders was energetic, practically euphoric. He would ski ahead, then halt and wait, grinning, while the others (7) up.
On day twelve a storm arrived with a torrent of snow that eliminated all visual reference; the party had to lie stationary in tents for thirty-one hours, burning fuel they could not replace. When they emerged, Anders could no longer fasten his own boots. He grunted at Peder's offer of help, which everyone understood to (8) refusal.
By day twenty the arithmetic had turned hostile. Their progress averaged 14 kilometres a day (9) a target of 22. Food was finite: nine days of rations remained, and the next depot lay 190 kilometres east.
Anders's concentration was failing; twice he deviated from the bearing and had to be corrected. Marta pulled the plug. "This is not a trial of character," she said. "It is a trial of tissue. Yours is losing." He insisted on one more day, then another, and lost both arguments at dawn.
The rescue was a snowmobile crew flown in at a cost of 340,000 kroner, most of it covered by insurance and the rest by a crowdfunding page that raised the sum in nineteen hours.
What haunted Anders was not the failure but the aftermath: an interview he gave to a regional paper in which he compared himself to a broken instrument. The comment drew 4,000 responses, some cruel, some kind, all of them (10) his point.
Two summers later, Marta found him in a workshop behind his sister's house, building sundials. Small ones, intricate, cut from scrap brass. He could hold a file if he braced his wrist against the bench.
He explained the principle with obvious delight: the gnomon, the shadow, the slow correspondence between the sun's position and the hour. No batteries. No nerves required. He had sold forty-one of them, and one had gone to a school in Kirkenes, where a nine-year-old girl had used it to explain time to her class.
Anders was, by his own account, extremely bad at conventional employment and extremely good at something else. The workshop smelled of metal and coffee. A half-finished dial lay under the lamp, its shadow an inch from noon, and he was still deciding whether the marking for one o'clock should be longer than the others.
Choices
(1) A. answering B. obeying C. responding D. following
(2) A. requested B. demanded C. required D. needed
(3) A. decided B. chose C. resolved D. opted
(4) A. consumed B. took C. spent D. cost
(5) A. consisted B. comprised C. included D. contained
(6) A. opposing B. rejecting C. resisting D. defying
(7) A. came B. caught C. showed D. turned
(8) A. indicate B. mean C. signify D. denote
(9) A. with B. against C. to D. for
(10) A. ignored B. overlooked C. missed D. neglected