首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Passage One Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata (formerly spelt as Calcutta), the capital of India’s West Bengal, a
Passage One Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata (formerly spelt as Calcutta), the capital of India’s West Bengal, a
admin
2022-10-07
19
问题
Passage One
Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata (formerly spelt as Calcutta), the capital of India’s West Bengal, and the home of nearly 15 million people, is often mentioned as the only one that still has a large fleet of hand-pulled rickshaws.
Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafes or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are school children. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.
From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains. During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, "When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws. "
While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states,Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a few hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination of garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2. 50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera. They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.
There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road. "I refuse to be carried by another human being myself," he said, "but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood. " Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.
When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean, " If you are so na?ve as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on. " Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say, Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. "The government was the government of the poor people," one sardar told me. "Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people. "
But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century. Kolkata, a resident told me, "has difficulty letting go. " One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.
"Which option has been chosen?" I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.
"That hasn’t been decided," he said.
"When will it be decided?"
"That hasn’t been decided," he said.
According to the passage, rickshaws are used in Kolkata mainly for the following purposes EXCEPT
选项
A、taking foreign tourists around the city
B、providing transport to school children
C、carrying store supplies and purchases
D、carrying people over short distances
答案
A
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/JTBK777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
MeaninginLiteratureInreadingliteraryworks,weareconcernedwiththe’meaning’ofoneliterarypieceoranother.Howev
WhyWeDon’tLikeEnglishClassesI.People’s【T1】______ofhowtolearnEnglish【T1】______A.Preconception:intention—registrat
WhyWeDon’tLikeEnglishClassesI.People’s【T1】______ofhowtolearnEnglish【T1】______A.Preconception:intention—registrat
A、Shefeltunhappyinsidethecompany.B、Shefeltworktheretoodemanding.C、Shewasdeniedpromotioninthecompany.D、Shelon
ConversationalSkillsPeoplewhousuallymakeusfeelcomfortableinconversationsaregoodtalkers.Andtheyhavesomething
A、Unacceptable.B、Unreasonable.C、Insensible.D、Ill-considered.D观点态度题。本题考查受采访者对采访人所持观点的态度。当采访者提出自己的猜测后,受采访者说:“Ithinkit’sour
PASSAGEONEWhat’stheconclusionoftheextensiveresearchonthetestosterone/aggressionlink?
(1)Shealmostdidnotrun.ChristineWilliamsadmitsmatnow.Shecouldbarelyputonefootafteranotherfollowingthewakefor
IfNajibullahZaziiseverythingtheFBIsaysheis,thentheAfghan-bornDenverairport-shuttle-busdriverrepresentsanewkin
PassaaeFourWhenmostanimalsdie,naturelikestotidyupbymakingtheirbodiesdisappear.Theremainsgeteatenbyscave
随机试题
仓储生产的空间组织核心是加快验收进度和降低成本、提高仓库和设备利用率。()
传播恙虫病是恙螨的
A.益气利水B.温阳利水C.滋阴利水D.行气利水E.清热利水
A、桑杏汤B、杏苏散C、沙参麦冬汤D、麦门冬汤E、百合固金汤咳嗽痰少,痰中带血或反复咯血,血色鲜红,口干咽燥,颧红,潮热盗汗,舌质红,脉细数。治疗应首选
在以下各项中,不属于现金折扣目的的是()。
贴现是指汇票持有人将未到期的商业汇票交给银行,银行受理后,按()交给贴现申请人。
企业在进行资本预算时需要对债务资本成本进行估计。如果不考虑所得税的影响,下列关于债务资本成本的说法中,正确的有()。
设在SQLServer2008中,某关系表需要存储职工的工资信息,工资的范围为2000~10000,设用整型类型存储。下列数据类型中最合适的是()。
下列关于报表的说法中,正确的是( )。
十进制数221用二进制数表示是
最新回复
(
0
)