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【阅读理解】Reading: The River That Refused to Heal
Mira Chen was 43 when the first dead fish appeared on the bank of the Fen River, and she counted 212 before she stopped.
She had been a fisheries officer for eleven years.
The water that morning was an amorphous gray, not the brassy brown she remembered from childhood.
"Something is wrong upstream," she told her colleague, Dan Luo, a hydrologist who had just turned 29 and still carried a waterproof notebook everywhere.
He crouched, dipped a vial, and said nothing for a long moment.
"Not wrong," he said finally. "Poisoned."
By the autumn of 2019, the river's dissolved oxygen had dropped to 2.1 milligrams per liter, far below the 5.0 needed for most native species.
The cause was not mysterious: a textile complex 18 kilometers north had been discharging untreated dye for at least four years.
The company's rank in local tax revenue was third, and its leadership had long been influential enough to delay inspections.
Mira and Dan filed 37 reports.
Each one vanished.
Then Dan found a limitation in the old monitoring system: the sensors recorded only every six hours, and the discharge always happened at night.
"They are not hiding," he said. "They are just betting we are lazy."
He was partly right.
So they undertook their own survey.
For 94 consecutive nights, the pair collected samples at three locations, using cheap conductivity meters and a borrowed drone.
The footage was brilliant, and also damning: a pipe the diameter of a man's torso, a black plume creeping downstream, fish turning belly-up in the beam.
When Mira posted a 4-minute clip online, it spread fast.
Within nine days, 1.4 million people had viewed it.
The company threatened legal action.
Mira's supervisor suggested she take leave.
Her response was a single sentence: "I will not."
The ensuing public pressure forced a shutdown order in March 2020, and the plant paid a fine of 6.8 million yuan—less than one month's profit.
That was the victory.
What followed was harder.
The river did not heal on cue.
Sediment still held heavy metals; upstream farms continued to overgraze the banks, and spring rain pushed more soil into the channel.
Three native fish species did not return.
Mira began to understand that renewal was not a finale but a slow, disharmony-prone process.
She and Dan expanded their work into an independent monitoring team of 11 people; they trained students and retired teachers to scout for pollution, to document, to testify.
Their budget in the first year was 80,000 yuan.
They spent 31,000 on equipment.
The rest went to transport and tea.
What kept them going were small, stubborn signs.
In July 2021, a child caught a yellow catfish near the old bridge—the first in six years.
The next spring, 23 volunteers planted reeds along 3.2 kilometers of bank.
Mira's daughter, then 14, joined once.
She asked, "Will it be like before?"
Mira said she did not know.
"Before" was itself a fiction; her own childhood river had already been altered by dams.
"Then what are we doing?" the girl asked.
"We are making it possible," Mira said. "Not the same. Possible."
By 2023 the team had grown to 40, with a waiting list.
They had helped draft two local regulations, both weaker than Mira hoped but stronger than she expected.
The company reopened under new management, and its wastewater now passes through a treatment plant that runs 24 hours.
Dan, who once dreamed of working abroad, stayed.
He said the river had become a personal obligation, and also an interest he could not shake.
"You cannot computerize trust," he told a reporter. "You earn it sample by sample."
That line ran in three newspapers.
He was proud of it for about a week.
The river today is not clean enough to swim in.
On a recent Friday, Mira stood on the same bank where she once counted dead fish, now counting living ones: 61 in an hour, mostly small, mostly common.
The water carried a faint chemical smell—not fatal, not fine.
Downstream, a new apartment complex was rising, its sales brochure promising a "riverside lifestyle."
Mira read the words twice, folded the brochure, and put it in her pocket.
She would bring it to the next meeting.
She had not yet decided what to say about it.
As she turned to leave, a boy ran past with a jar.
Inside, a single shrimp moved its legs against the glass.
"Is this from the river?" she asked.
The boy nodded, breathless.
"My dad says if we see one, we should tell someone."
Mira looked at the jar, then at the water.
The shrimp kept moving, tiny and stubborn.
She took out her
Questions
1. What was the main cause of the pollution in the Fen River?
A. Untreated dye discharged by a textile complex. B. Reduced oxygen from natural sediment. C. Heavy metals from upstream farms. D. Wastewater from a new apartment complex.
2. How did Mira and Dan gather evidence against the polluter?
A. By filing reports with local authorities. B. By using the old monitoring system's sensors. C. By conducting their own night surveys for 94 days. D. By interviewing the company's leadership.
3. What does the word "damning" in the passage most nearly mean?
A. Extremely beautiful. B. Strongly condemnatory. C. Deeply saddening. D. Highly confusing.
4. What can be inferred about Mira's view of the river's recovery?
A. She is confident that the new regulations will solve all problems. B. She believes the river will return to its original state. C. She sees it as a slow process that may never fully restore the past. D. She thinks the recovery is impossible without more funding.
5. Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
A. The Challenges of Environmental Monitoring. B. The Role of Volunteers in Environmental Protection. C. The Fight Against Industrial Pollution. D. A River's Slow and Stubborn Recovery.