2. 职称英语
  3. I am standing on the seventh-floor balcony of an apartment building overlook

I am standing on the seventh-floor balcony of an apartment building overlook

游客2025-04-06  20
问题     I am standing on the seventh-floor balcony of an apartment building overlooking the heart of Moscow. It is a dark city, some might say grim. It looks and feels as if it has been worn down to its bare bones: broken sidewalks, cracked facades, weeds rooted in the very mortar. This city is not easy to look at. So I avert my eyes, and they settle on a little boy sleeping inside the apartment. His name is Alexei. He is 7. With every rise and fall of his chest, Moscow, the used, broken city, is renewed for me a thousand times. A dark place has given me light in the form of my adoptive son.
    Alexei has been my son for only two days, but I have been waiting three years for him. That’s when I began the adoption process, three years ago, before I even knew of Alexei’s existence. Never in my imaginings did I think that I would one day be so far from home, counting my son’s breaths, counting the hours until we would board a plane for America, a place that he had no conception of "Alexei, " I had said through a translator as I knelt before him at the orphanage and helped him with his socks. " What do you know about America?" His reply was immediate: "I will have all the gum I want. "
    Most people adopt infants or very little children so that as much of their history as possible will be given to them by their parents. But Alexei carries a radiance of native culture: his memories of orphanage life in the once-closed city of Tula; the large, gracious, doting Russian women who have cared for him all his life; the aromatic Russian food he loves, and the language, that impossible, expressive, explosive Russian language that sometimes separates me from him like a wall, but also summons us to heroic legends as we attempt to communicate.
    I have been in Russia for two weeks. But it wasn’t until the fourth day that I was brought to see Alexei. My Russian contact drove me through 100 miles of a country struggling to get back on its feet after years of internal neglect; pitted roadways, crumbling bridges, warped roofs. It made me recall what someone had once said about Russia, that she is a third-world country with a first-world army. We finally came to an orphanage. Once inside, I stood in a near-empty room, reminding myself that this was the culmination of three years of scrutiny, disappointment, and dead-ends.
    There were moments when I had told myself, "It’s so much easier to have a kid the natural way. Nobody asks any questions. " But as a single man, a biological child was not a ready option. I now recognized these as idle thoughts, for I realized that Alexei, even sight unseen, would be as much mine as if he were my natural son.
    The door opened. A woman came out, her hand on the shoulder of a little boy just awakened from sound sleep.
    I gave Alexei a Pez candy dispenser, something as alien to him as life in America. After a few moments of scrutiny, he filled with candy, a sure sign of intelligence, for Pez, dispensers are notoriously difficult to load.
    At the end of our first meeting I knelt before Alexei and told him I would be back to get him in a week. [br] The author apparently appreciates and respects
选项 A、the rich and brilliant culture of the country
B、the orphans’ history given by their parents
C、the great country for nurturing his lovely son
D、the gracious woman for bringing up his lovely son
答案 A
解析 作者欣赏并尊重该国丰富而又灿烂的文化。根据第三段，阿列克谢的身上弥漫着光辉灿烂的俄罗斯文化气息：他回想起在曾经关闭的图拉城中度过了孤儿院的生活；在他一生中，那些身材硕大、举止优雅、宠爱孩子的俄罗斯妇女对他关怀备至；他爱吃芳香四溢的俄罗斯食品；此外，让人难以接受的、富于表现力的、极有争议的俄语有时像一堵墙把我同他分隔开来，但在我们试图交流时，这门语言把我们召唤到英雄传奇中去。
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