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【完形填空】Cloze: The Price of a Post
At 11:47 p.m., Mira Chen was locking the café when her phone (1) with a message: "Everyone knows what you did."
By morning, the same sentence had (2) into 4,000 comments on three platforms.
Six months earlier, she had joined a coding camp by the lake, (3) by the promise of a mentor and a scholarship.
There she met Daniel Wu, a young instructor who spoke of ethical design (4) others spoke of weather.
"You cannot build a product and (5) its penetration into private life," he told the class.
Mira, who had dropped out of university to support her mother, found his faith in humanistic software (6).
She began to sketch a messaging app that would let users buy anonymity credits, hoping to (7) trolls before they could scare anyone away.
Daniel agreed to host the prototype on his own server, but he warned her: "The internet is not a medium of goodwill. It is a mirror, and sometimes a (8)."
The bullying began in March. A fabricated screenshot showed Mira allegedly plagiarising code. The image was crude but (9) enough to persuade thousands.
Her boss asked her to stay home. Her mother's blood pressure rose. Mira tried to post a clarification, but the platform's algorithm (10) it beneath outrage.
She lost 6 kilograms in five weeks and 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 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."
Choices
(1) A. buzzed B. rang C. clicked D. beeped
(2) A. mushroomed B. grown C. expanded D. swelled
(3) A. attracted B. drawn C. pulled D. tempted
(4) A. the way B. like C. as D. how
(5) A. ignore B. neglect C. dismiss D. overlook
(6) A. irresistible B. irresistible C. resistible D. irresistible
(7) A. repel B. repeal C. repulse D. reject
(8) A. weapon B. missile C. bullet D. arrow
(9) A. exact B. accurate C. correct D. precise
(10) A. concealed B. hid C. buried D. covered