In1880,thetravellerandjournalistLafcadioHearnwaslivingi...
问题详情：
In 1880, the traveller and journalist Lafcadio Hearn was living in New Orleans and writing for a couple of local papers, Daily City Item and TimesDemocrat. Hearn sensed that New Orleans exists in a state of insidious disintegration(蜕变)—“crumbling into ashes”—thanks to its dangerous geography and its “frauds and maladministrations.” And yet, Hearn wrote to a friend, “It is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.” New Orleanians have always resembled New Yorkers; they tend to share the sense that to live anywhere else would lead inevitably to a stupid and pitiable existence beyond the bounds of understanding.
In part, the spirit of New Orleans is rooted in the city's belowsealevel unsteadiness, the condition of looking out—and even up—at the water all around you, the knowledge that water saturates(浸透) the ground you stand on. Katrina, the fierce hurricane that destroyed the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, tested the selfpossession of every citizen who survived it. More than eighteen hundred people did not survive it, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. The storm and the terrible flooding that followed—a natural disaster worsened by a range of manmade disasters—revealed much that had been fragile, or rotten, in Hearn's time and grew worse with every decade: shabby civil engineering; corrupt and inefficient government institutions; and it turned out that an Administration in Washington witnessed for days a city drowning—a largely black city drowning—and reacted with annoying indifference. And yet, in the face of abandonment—in hospitals, on rooftops, on highway overpasses—the residents of New Orleans behaved with resilience(不折不挠). Rebecca Solnit, an acute observer of Katrina and its aftermath, has written, “The belief that a Hobbesian war of allagainstall had broken loose justified treating the place as a crime zone or even an unfriendly country rather than a place in which grandmothers and children were trapped in frightful conditions, desperately in need of food, water, shelter and medical attention.”
Alec Soth, a photographer who lives in Minneapolis and travels the Midwest and the South with the energy of a latterday Walker Evans, did not join the artists who came to New Orleans a decade ago to capture what he calls the “eye candy of rot and ruin.” Instead, he waited, preferring to capture the city of water ten years later, a city in a state of both persistent suffering and persistent renewal. Soth shows us the upsetting image of a freestanding column—all that is left of a house in the hardhit Lower Ninth Ward—but he moves toward a vision of promise, a lonely figure at his leisure, staring into the waters of today's New Orleans.
31. New Orleanians are similar to New Yorkers in that________.
A. they refuse to leave their homeland B. they exist in insidious disintegration
C. they possess dangerous geography D. they have a sense of boring existence
32. What can we know from the hurricane Katrina and its damaging consequences?
A. A range of manmade disasters led to the fierce hurricane.
B. The hurricane happened following a terrible flooding.
C. The American government failed to provide help and support.
D. The residents of New Orleans have a deep hatred for governors.
33. Why did Alec Soth refuse to join other artists to take photos of New Orleans a decade ago?
A. He also treated New Orleans as a crime zone.
B. He had high expectations of the future of New Orleans.
C. He couldn't put up with the suffering the hurricane caused.
D. He was traveling the Midwest and the South with Walker Evans.
【回答】
ACB
知识点：历史类
题型：阅读理解
