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  3. As a Floridian who’s weathered his share of hurricanes, I can more than symp

As a Floridian who’s weathered his share of hurricanes, I can more than symp

游客2023-12-02  31
问题     As a Floridian who’s weathered his share of hurricanes, I can more than sympathize with my northeastern countrymen as they begin the lousy task of cleaning up after Sandy. But there’s one commonality that stands out for me as a parent. Just as "Frankenstorm" struck days before Halloween, so did Hurricane Wilma wreck South Florida seven years ago this week. My kids were teens then (remember Harry Potter costumes?) and I have a piece of advice now for the parents of trick-or-treaters from Virginia to Maine: Don’t cancel Halloween, as I’m seeing so many towns up there announcing they’ll do. Postpone it. Delay it. But as soon as you can, have it.
    That might sound like fairly trivial counsel given the deadly havoc the Northeast is dealing with at this moment. But that grim situation—and the impact I’ve personally seen it have on children—is precisely the reason I’m offering it. During times like this, one crucial thing kids need is a reassuring sign or two of normalcy. What’s more, if you’re going to have a hurricane hit you during a holiday, Halloween is the best when it comes to children; For all its lighthearted revelry of costumes and candy, this delightfully gothic autumn festival also manages to teach kids something about confronting life’s darker side.
    Wilma tore across Florida a week before Halloween in 2005, on Oct. 24, littering the peninsula’s southern half with uprooted trees, exploded rooftops and glass shards from high-rise condominium windows. Almost 40 people were killed; more than 3 million of us were without power for weeks, and the damage topped $20 billion. I remember interviewing a group of shell-shocked elementary school kids who’d been having a "hurricane sleepover" in a Miami Beach high-rise when the Category 2 winds destroyed the apartment and almost blew them into Biscayne Bay.
    Many people considered shutting Halloween down amid that mess. Still, when I looked up long enough from my own aggravating cleanup work, or from my deadline stories about the disaster, I could see the dispiriting effect that the prospect of ditching Halloween was having on my children, then aged 10 and 8. It wasn’t just that they were losing out on the fun. Halloween by then had also become a comforting part of their children’s almanac. Not having it would have left a hole that only compounded the hurricane trauma they were trying to absorb all around them.
    I might not have been so tuned in to their funk had I not covered Miami’s Elian Gonzdlez debacle five years earlier. The one thing the child psychiatrists I interviewed then kept telling me was that Elidn, like any kid that age, needed structure returned to his life, especially after the horrifying experience of watching his mother drown in the Atlantic Ocean. I remembered that wisdom after Wilma, and it made me and a number of other parents in our community resolve to forge ahead with a proper Halloween. Not just the trick-or-treating but a party afterward with ghost stories, bobbing for apples and limbo dancing. Observing Oct. 31 , damn the mess, helped the kids forget Oct. 24 for a while, and I’d be willing to bet they remember it as one of their best Halloweens.
    And maybe, in retrospect, one of the more meaningful. Halloween doesn’t just help kids forget their cares; it invites them to face their fears. I’ve never understood parents who boycott Halloween because they believe it introduces children to the occult or even Satan worship. As far as I’m concerned, it does just the opposite. Halloween doesn’t embrace death—it mocks it. (I would also remind conservative Christians that while it’s a secular holiday today, "Halloween" traditionally means "All Hallows’ Eve," the night before All Saints Day on the Roman Catholic calendar.) In that sense it’s a lot like Mexico’s Day of the Dead, which unfolds every Nov. 2 in all its skeletons-and-marigolds splendor. I call the Day of the Dead the Mexican Halloween because it serves much the same harvest-season purpose; to make us less scared of death by letting us party with it for a moment.
    That kind of positive ritual comes in handy when children are trying to make sense of tragedy. When I look at the 2005 Halloween photos of our neighborhood kids today, I see more than youngsters laughing at their fantasy frights. I also sense children who might be coping a bit better with the real mayhem they’d just witnessed. So in spite of this week’s catastrophe, let the kids put on a Frankenstein costume—because it might help them put away their nightmares of Frankenstorm. [br] Which of the following best describes the author’s development of writing?
选项 A、Relating a current event with an earlier one→ raising a suggestion→switching to the past event→restating some reasons for the suggestion.
B、Posing a problem→analyzing the situation→putting forward some solutions.
C、Revealing a problem →switching to similar ones in the past→analyzing the similarities between past and present.
D、Narrating a story→commenting on the story→inviting an open discussion.
答案 A
解析 篇章题。作者开篇将刚刚经过美国东北部的飓风桑迪和五年前的飓风“威尔玛”联系起来，表明自己作为一名家长，在看待人们因桑迪在万圣节前夕来临而讨论取消万圣节问题上的看法；作者接着回忆七年前袭击其家乡的威尔玛飓风及其对孩子们的影响，并结合儿童专家医师的建议提出自己的想法——即使飓风在万圣节期间到来，也不应借此取消这个节日，恰恰相反，万圣节在减轻孩子对于灾难的恐惧心理上起着积极的作用；作者在文章最后总结了自己的观点，并给出了提出这个建议的理由，因此选[A]。
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