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【阅读理解】Reading: The Price of Speaking Up
The first message arrived at 11:47 p.m., just as Mira Chen was closing the café.
"Everyone knows what you did," it read.
She was twenty-three, a barista in Huzhou, and by morning the same sentence had mushroomed into 4,000 comments across three platforms.
Her phone buzzed constantly.
She turned it face-down.
Six months earlier, Mira had joined a weekend coding camp by the lake, drawn by the promise of a mentor and a scholarship worth 18,000 yuan.
There she met Daniel Wu, a thirty-one-year-old instructor who spoke of ethical design the way others spoke of weather.
"You cannot build a product and ignore its penetration into private life," he told the class.
"Terms of service are not a shield."
Mira, who had dropped out of university to support her mother, found his faith in small, humanistic software irresistible.
She began to sketch a messaging app that would let users purchase anonymity credits, hoping to repel trolls before they could scare anyone away.
Daniel agreed to host the prototype on his own server.
He also warned her: "The internet is not a medium of goodwill.
It is a mirror, and sometimes a missile."
The bullying began in March.
A fabricated screenshot, presumably doctored by a former classmate, showed Mira allegedly plagiarising a competitor's code.
The image was crude but accurate enough to persuade thousands.
Her boss at the café asked her to stay home.
Her mother's blood pressure rose.
Mira tried to intervene by posting a clarification, but the platform's algorithm buried it beneath outrage.
"The tragedy," Daniel said later, "is that comprehension takes minutes and outrage takes seconds."
She lost 6 kilograms in five weeks.
She stopped attending church, stopped answering calls, stopped sleeping before dawn.
The online menace had become a physical one: she was afraid to leave her flat.
Then came the turn.
A quiet student named Leo, seventeen and indolent about most things, had kept the original chat logs.
He was not courageous, but he was accurate.
On a Tuesday he uploaded a twenty-minute video that compared timestamps, IP addresses, and editing artefacts — a stereoscopic breakdown of the hoax.
It got 900 views in the first day.
Then 60,000 by Friday.
The same users who had condemned Mira now demanded justice for her.
Some sent money, small amounts, 5 or 10 yuan, payable through a crowdfunding page.
The public apology from her accuser was brief and bitter.
Mira accepted it without joy.
The cost remained.
She had lost her job, her savings, and something harder to name.
Daniel's server had been hacked during the scandal; 2,300 users' data leaked.
The scholarship committee withdrew its offer, citing "reputational risk."
Mira's mentor, once so sure of his principles, confessed he had underestimated the intrusion.
"I intended to protect you," he said.
"Instead I exposed you."
He shut down the prototype.
The code, once a symbol of hope, now sat in a folder labelled 'doom'.
In September, Mira returned to the café.
She still made coffee, still smiled at regulars.
But she had changed her privacy settings, deleted four apps, and stopped believing that any platform could eradicate cruelty.
One evening, a young woman approached her table.
"Are you the one from the video?" she asked.
Mira nodded.
The woman sat down.
"I'm being bullied too," she said.
"Can you teach me what you learned?"
Mira looked at her phone, then at the lake outside, where the water reflected the streetlights in broken, shimmering pieces.
"I can try," she said.
"But I don't know if it will be enough."
Questions
1. What did Mira Chen do for a living at the beginning of the passage?
A. She was a university student. B. She was a coding instructor. C. She was a barista in Huzhou. D. She was a scholarship officer.
2. What was the main purpose of the messaging app Mira sketched?
A. To allow users to purchase anonymity credits and repel trolls. B. To compare timestamps and IP addresses automatically. C. To host prototypes on Daniel's server for free. D. To help users crowdfund money for bullying victims.
3. The word "indolent" in the sentence "Leo, seventeen and indolent about most things" is closest in meaning to:
A. lazy B. diligent C. courageous D. curious
4. Why did the scholarship committee withdraw its offer to Mira?
A. Because she refused to accept the public apology. B. Because she had dropped out of university earlier. C. Because she was involved in a reputational scandal. D. Because she failed to complete the coding camp.
5. What is the best title for this passage?
A. A Mentor's Guide to Ethical Design B. The Power of Crowdfunding C. The Price of Speaking Up D. How to Build a Messaging App