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  8
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] When the author was travelling 100 miles of a country, which of the following is NOT a sign showing it was pretty worn-out?
选项 A、Roads scarred with holes.
B、Walls overgrown with weeds.
C、Streets leading to dead-ends.
D、Bridges falling into decay.
答案 B
解析 作者在俄国旅行100英里时，以下哪一项不是证明该国相当破旧的迹象?第四段中的pitted roadways(坑坑洼洼的路面)与A(Roads scarred with holes)同义；crumbling bridges(损坏了的桥梁)与D(Bridges falling into decay)同义；dead—ends(死胡同)与C(Streets leading to dead—ends)相关；没有提到B(Walls overgrown with weeds)。
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