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【阅读理解】Reading: The River and the Researcher
When the letter came, Lin Xiaoran was nineteen, a first-year student in Kunming and the first in her family to attend university.
Her father drove a truck and her mother sold vegetables, so the offer of a paid summer internship at a research institute felt both huge and risky.
The institute studied the upper Mekong, a river that changes from glacier to delta over 4,350 kilometres.
Xiaoran was put in a team of seven led by Dr. Pan, a 54-year-old who had spent twenty years measuring sediment.
On the first morning, Dr. Pan told them, 'The river is not one thing. It is a helix of demands.'
Xiaoran liked that idea and began to work twelve hours a day, searching satellite images for signs of overgrazing along the banks.
She ignored her parents' phone calls twice a week, while other interns moved between laboratory work and fieldwork.
By week five, she found a 3.2-kilometre stretch near a tributary where vegetation had dropped by 27 percent over four years.
She checked the data three times, but Dr. Pan warned, 'Plausible, but you must conduct yourself with caution.'
She wrote it up anyway, knowing that the findings, if correct, would strengthen a case against a new hydropower dam.
At a Friday meeting, a senior researcher named Guo Wei, 41, leaned back and asked, 'Who taught you to read a river?'
'No one,' she said. 'I taught myself.' The room went quiet, and Guo Wei smiled.
He said, 'Then you have a unique position—and a dangerous one.'
Within a week, her name appeared in a regional newspaper as part of a story about 'outside interference.'
Her father called, furious, and said, 'Abolish this nonsense. Come home.' She did not go home.
Instead, she undertook a second analysis with a parallel dataset from 2009, and the numbers held.
But the cost was real: her internship was suspended, her stipend frozen, and a note placed in her file.
Dr. Pan, who had encouraged her, now could not speak to her publicly, though in a corridor he whispered, 'I concur with your methods, but I cannot protect you from the onslaught.'
She packed her bag that night, and the dormitory lock clicked at 11:04.
What she carried home was not a triumph but a scar and a question.
She spent the next two years finishing her degree, working nights at a convenience store, and sending letters to 14 environmental organisations.
Three replied, and one, a small NGO in Chiang Rai, offered her a job when she was 22.
Her father, who had not spoken to her for months, drove her to the bus station in silence and handed her a plastic bag with two boiled eggs and a note: 'Eat. Do not forget the river.'
She cried briefly and boarded the bus.
The work was not glamorous: she measured water quality, catalogued fish species, and taught village children to read rainfall charts.
In 2023, she returned to Kunming for a reunion of that first internship cohort, where seven had become five, Guo Wei had left academia, and Dr. Pan had retired.
She stood by the same window where she had once read the letter, now 25 and responsible for a team of four.
A young intern asked, 'Is it worth it?' She looked at the river below, brown and indifferent, and said nothing.
The question stayed in the air, unanswered, like sediment that has not yet settled.
Questions
1. What did Lin Xiaoran discover by week five of her internship?
A. A 3.2-kilometre stretch near a tributary where vegetation had dropped by 27 percent over four years. B. A 3.2-kilometre stretch near a dam where fish species had dropped by 27 percent. C. A 4,350-kilometre stretch of the Mekong where sediment had increased by 27 percent. D. A 27-kilometre stretch near a tributary where overgrazing had increased by 3.2 percent.
2. What happened to Lin Xiaoran's internship after her findings were presented?
A. She was promoted to lead a team of seven researchers. B. Her internship was suspended and her stipend was frozen. C. Her stipend was increased and she was given a permanent position. D. She was asked to leave the country immediately.
3. As used in the passage, what does the word 'onslaught' most nearly mean?
A. A strong and sudden attack. B. A slow and steady improvement. C. A quiet and peaceful period. D. A formal agreement.
4. What can be inferred about Dr. Pan's attitude toward Lin Xiaoran's work?
A. He encouraged her to publish more aggressively without caution. B. He disagreed with her methods and reported her to the authorities. C. He was indifferent to her findings and ignored her completely. D. He supported her methods but felt unable to protect her publicly.
5. Which of the following would be the most suitable title for the passage?
A. A Guide to Satellite Image Analysis for Interns B. The Benefits of Hydropower Dams in Yunnan C. The River and the Researcher: A Story of Courage and Cost D. How to Measure Sediment in the Mekong River