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  3. It didn’t look like America, the exodus of stunned refugees wading through turbid, waist-high water, carrying only what mattered

It didn’t look like America, the exodus of stunned refugees wading through turbid, waist-high water, carrying only what mattered

admin2012-03-21  39
问题     It didn’t look like America, the exodus of stunned refugees wading through turbid, waist-high water, carrying only what mattered most: sick relatives, bundled babies, storm-soaked family Bibles. It looked like another country, the kind of place where armed bandits outnumber police and desperate families search garbage dumpsters for food. A place where the poorest of the poor die in the heat, their corpses ignored on the side of the road.
    Across the Gulf Coast, lifelong residents who thought they had seen it all were left with nothing in the wake of a storm that has caused what may well be the worst natural disaster ever to hit the United States. Katrina’s lethal one-two punch of 145-mile-per-hour winds and a 25-foot storm surge left 90,000 square miles of heartbreak, devastation, and unhinged lives, as rich and poor alike scrounged for food and water, searched for loved ones in rivers of foul, tea-colored water, and wondered Why on earth was help so slow in coming? "A national disgrace," Terry Ebbert, New Orleans’s homeland-security director, said of Washington’s emergency-relief efforts.
    The challenges of delivering help and restoring order were without precedent. Experts placed the price tag on the havoc caused by Katrina’s wrath at $30 billion, but for now, that can be only an educated guess. What can be said for sure is that Katrina uprooted more Americans than the Civil War, the Dust Bowl storms of the 1930s, or the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Reaching for a more recent comparison, a weary, crestfallen a. J. Holloway, the mayor of Biloxi, Miss., which saw its own share of despair and heartbreak, said: "This is our tsunami."
    Early in the week, the nation had breathed a sigh of relief for its beloved Crescent City — Bourbon Street was dry, and Katrina seemed like just another dodge-the-bullet story as revelers roamed the rain-smeared streets, go-cups in hand. By nightfall after landfall, it looked as if the Bananas Foster would be flaming merrily at Commander’s Palace once again. But after the levees broke the next day and the bathtub-shaped Big Easy began filling up with the brackish waters of Lake Pontchartrain, a complicated network of pumps failed and 80 percent of the city was soon under water, creating what public health officials warned could soon become a breeding ground for West Nile virus, dysentery, and a host of other potentially lethal diseases.
    "Help us." In what officials say is the largest domestic military relief effort in the nation’s history, the Pentagon sent aircraft, rescue crews, and teams of Navy SEAL s to help out. Coast Guard divers descended from hovering helicopters, smashing though roofs with axes, sweeping the sick from makeshift rafts, and spiriting away those most in need of aid.
    But for far too many, for the first few days, relief remained elusive. Kids climbed on a roof holding a sign that read simply, "Help us." Bands of looters, some deadly, some merely desperate, roamed the streets. At week’s end, the floodwaters covered slightly less than half the city, but police and National Guard units were still keeping a wary eye on looters and gun-toting residents while trying to restore order amid reports of beatings, rapes, and shootings. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a "desperate SOS," pleading for more of everything — food and water, relief help, buses to evacuate the sick and elderly — anything that could help jump-start what inevitably will be a slow and tortuous return to something like normal.
Which statement is not true?
选项 A、Katrina had 145-mile-per-hour winds.
B、Only poor people were looking for food.
C、It was regarded as a national disgrace.
D、It was the challenge of delivering help.
答案D
解析 细节理解题。见第二段“as rich and poor alike scrounged for food and water”。
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