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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2023-12-05  12
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 Gonzalez 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] What does the author mean by saying "But there’s one commonality that stands out for me as a parent. " in Paragraph One?
选项 A、He/She has a lot more memories of hurricanes than people in the northeast.
B、He/She has similar feelings toward natural disasters as parents in the northeast.
C、As a parent, he/she has also been hit by hurricanes during a holiday.
D、As a parent, he/she strongly opposes to the cancelling of Halloween.
答案 C
解析 语义题根据第一段可知，作者将刚刚经过美国东北部的飓风桑迪与五年前袭击其家乡佛罗里达州的飓风威尔玛联系起来，指出这两次飓风虽然袭击的地点相差很远，但都在万圣节前夕来临；威尔玛来袭时作者的孩子只有十几岁，接着作者以过来人的身份给桑迪过境后正赶上过万圣节的孩子们的家长提了个建议，故选[C]。[A]指出家在美国南部的作者比起东北部的人们有更多关于飓风的记忆，而题干中的“commonality”指的是共同特征，故排除；[B]虽在常识上正确，但在第一段并未提及，故排除；[D]是作者针对全美多地在飓风桑迪来袭时取消万圣节的呼声而提出的个人建议，并不是作者和其他家长的共同点，故也排除。
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