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  3. Letty the old lady lived in a "Single Room Occupancy" hotel approved by the

Letty the old lady lived in a "Single Room Occupancy" hotel approved by the

游客2024-11-18  36
问题     Letty the old lady lived in a "Single Room Occupancy" hotel approved by the New York City welfare department and occupied by old losers, junkies, cockroaches and rats. Whenever she left her room—a tiny cubicle with a cot, a chair, a seven-year-old calendar and a window so filthy it blended with the unspeakable walls—she would pack all her valuables in two large shopping bags and carry them with her. If she didn’t, everything would disappear when she left the hotel. Her "things" were also a burden. Everything she managed to possess was portable and had multiple uses. A shawl is more versatile than a sweater, and hats are no good at all, although she used to have lots of nice hats, she told me.
    The first day I saw Letty I had left my apartment in search of a "bag lady". I had seen these women round the city frequently, had spoken to a few. Sitting around the parks had taught me more about these city vagabonds. As a group, few were eligible for social security. They had always been flotsam and jetsam, floating from place to place and from job to job—waitress, short order cook, sales clerk, stock boy, maid, mechanic, porter—all those jobs held by faceless people. The "bag ladies" were a special breed. They looked and acted and dressed strangely in some of the most determinedly conformist areas of the city. They frequented Fourteen Street downtown, and the fancy shopping districts. They seemed to like crowds but remained alone. They held long conversations with themselves, with telephone poles, with unexpected cracks in the sidewalk. They hung around lunch counters and cafeterias, and could remain impervious to the rudeness of a determined waitress and sit for hours clutching a coffee cup full of cold memories.
    Letty was my representative bag lady. I picked her up on the corner of Fourteenth and Third Avenue. She had the most suspicious face I had encountered; her entire body, in fact, was pulled forward in one large question mark. She was carrying a double plain brown shopping bag and a larger white bag ordering you to vote for some obscure man for some obscure office and we began talking about whether or not she was an unpaid advertisement. I asked her if she would have lunch with me, and let me treat, as a matter of fact. After some hesitation and a few sharp glances over the top of her glasses, Letty the Bag Lady let me come into her life. We had lunch that day, the next, and later the next week.
    Being a bag lady was a full-time job. Take the problem of the hotels. You can’t stay to long in any one of those welfare hotels, Letty told me, because the junkies figure out your routine, and when you get your checks, and you’ll be robbed, even killed. So you have to move a lot. And every time you move, you have to make three trips to the welfare office to get them to approve the new place, even if it’s just another cockroach-filled, rat-infested hole in the wall. During the last five years, Letty tried to move every two or three months.
    Most of our conversations took place standing in line. New York State had just changed the regulations governing Medicaid cards and Letty had to get a new card. That took two hours in line, one hour sitting in a large dank-smelling room, and two minutes with a social worker who never once looked up. Another time, her case worker at the welfare office sent Letty to try and get food stamps, and after standing in line for three hours she found out she didn’t qualify because she didn’t have cooking facilities in her room. "This is my social life,"she said. "I run around the city and stand in line. You stand in line to see one of them fancy movies and calling it art; I stand in line for medicine, for food, for glasses, for the cards to get pills, for the pills; I stand in line to see people who never see who I am; at the hotel, sometimes I even have to stand in line to go to the John. When I die there’ll probably be a line to get through the gate, and when I get up to the front of the line, somebody will push it closed and say,’ Sorry. Come back after lunch. ’ These agencies, I figure they have to make it as hard for you to get help as they can, so only really strong people or really stubborn people like me can survive. "
    Letty would talk and talk; sometimes, she didn’t seem to know I was even there. She never remembered my name, and would give a little start of surprise whenever I said hers, as if it had been a long time since anyone had said "Letty. " I don’t think she thought of herself as a person, anymore; I think she had accepted the view that she was a welfare case, a Mediaid card, a nuisance in the bus depot in the winter time, a victim to any petty criminal, existing on about the same level as cockroaches.  [br] Which of the following is closest in meaning to " flotsam and jetsam" in the second paragraph?
选项 A、Old losers.
B、Junkies.
C、Vagabonds.
D、Bag ladies.
答案 C
解析 语义题。第二段第五句提到“They had always been flotsam and jetsam，floating from place to place and from job to job”，这些人没有固定工作，总是四处流浪，根据上下文可知，此段话是对“vagabonds”(流浪者)的进一步描述，故答案为[C]。接着提到“The bag ladies’were a special breed”，其中“提兜女郎”是一个特殊群体，可知“提兜女郎”只是“vagabonds”中的一类，故排除[D]。
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