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
Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata(formerly spelt as Calcutta), the capital of India’s West Bengal, and the home of ne
Among the great cities of the world, Kolkata(formerly spelt as Calcutta), the capital of India’s West Bengal, and the home of ne
admin
2015-04-24
15
问题
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 comer 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 coining 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 conies 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 naive 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.
We can infer from the passage that some educated and politically aware people______.
选项
A、hold mixed feelings towards rickshaws
B、strongly support the ban on rickshaws
C、call for humanitarian actions for rickshaw pullers
D、keep quiet on the issue of banning rickshaws
答案
A
解析
细节判断题。由题干关键词educated and politically aware people定位至第五段首句。首句指出他们不乘坐人力车的原因“…because they regard the hand—pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism”,之后第二句指出“some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws”,原因是该段倒数第二句提到的“but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood”,可见这些人对于人力车感情复杂。故答案为A。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/nfLO777K
0
考博英语
相关试题推荐
TestshaveconfirmedthatfourpeopleinWisconsincontractedthemonkeypoxvirusaftercomingintoclosecontactwithpetprair
TestshaveconfirmedthatfourpeopleinWisconsincontractedthemonkeypoxvirusaftercomingintoclosecontactwithpetprair
TestshaveconfirmedthatfourpeopleinWisconsincontractedthemonkeypoxvirusaftercomingintoclosecontactwithpetprair
AlongandpainfulstrugglewithcancerandchemotherapyhadcausedbaldnessforBarbaraBasset,ofMocrstown,NJ.Thedayherb
Priortothe20thcentury,manylanguageswithsmallnumbersofspeakerssurvivedforcenturies.Theincreasinglyinterconnected
(81)Realestate,inbroaddefinition,islandandeverythingmadepermanentlyapartthereof,andthenatureandextentofone’s
TheeventsofSept.11haveratchetedupsecurityatAmericanairportstothehighestlevelever,accordingtoaspokesmanforT
Wateristhegiverand,atthesametime,thetakeroflife.Itcoversmostofthesurfaceoftheplanetweliveonandfeatures
随机试题
公文的主要作用除了“指导工作,传达意图”“联系工作,交流情况”外,还包括()
支气管哮喘发病机制的实质是()
在运用比较财务报表这种方法时,选择的期数越多,分析结果的准确性也越低。()
进行负荷计算时,整流变压器的设备功率指的是什么?()
建设工程项目施工质量验收时,对施工质量保证资料的检查包括施工全过程的技术质量管理资料。其中,又以原材料、施工检测、测量复核及()资料为重点检查内容。
在财政法的体系中,处于核心法、骨干法地位的是()。
资本资产套利模型认为,当市场存在套利机会时,投资者对这一机会的利用便会改变对原来各种证券的持有比例,逐渐使得套利机会消失,最终各种证券价格自动归位。()
中国历史上地方政府设立学校始于()。
(1)射门得分(2)玻璃被打碎(3)孩子们吓跑了(4)孩子们在踢足球(5)房屋主人寻找肇事者
下列关于行政处罚一事不再罚原则的说法正确的有()。
最新回复
(
0
)