April was an unusual, if not the cruelest, month for New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who in September will mark t

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问题     April was an unusual, if not the cruelest, month for New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, who in September will mark two years on the job. On Monday afternoon, April 15, Abramson—who, at 59, is the first woman to serve as top editor in the Times’ 160-year history— had barely begun savoring the four Pulitzer Prizes that her staff had just won when the Boston Marathon bombings occurred. Pulling an all-nighter at one point in the third-floor newsroom of the Times’ Renzo Piano-designed Manhattan skyscraper, she presided over a breathless week of "flooding the zone", while her reporters and editors managed to avoid the sort of embarrassing errors committed by the Associated Press, CNN, and even the Times Co. -owned Boston Globe.
    Then, the night of April 23, Politico—the Washington trade paper that aims to "drive the conversation"—published a story suggesting that Abramson’s young editorship was already a failure. Quoting anonymous former and current Times employees, Politico claimed she was widely considered "stubborn," "condescending," "difficult to work with," "unreasonable," "impossible," "disengaged," and "uncaring"—"on the verge of losing the support of the newsroom."
    A petite woman who speaks in an exaggerated Upper West Side drawl that evokes The Nanny Meets Harvard, Abramson was home alone in Tribeca the night the story broke. Her husband of 32 years, Henry Griggs, was out, as were their two adult children, when she read it online.
    Running The New York Times has never been for the faint of heart. Abramson’s 23 months at the wheel have been punctuated by the death in Syria of Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid, a bitter contract dispute with the Newspaper Guild, and, seven months ago, forced buyouts of around 30 midlevel editors, including some of the Times’ most beloved veterans.
    Yet, unique in an industry plagued by cutbacks and shutdowns, Abramson’s newsroom is staffed at the same level as it was a decade ago, and boasts 14 national and six regional bureaus, plus 25 foreign bureaus—more than at any moment in the paper’s history. This is in complete contrast to such newspapers as The Washington Post, which over the past decade closed all its domestic bureaus and reduced drastically the head count in its newsroom, once more than 900, by nearly a fourth. Meanwhile, the Times’ risky transition from free to metered online access appears to be working: the Web edition boasts more than 700,000 paying subscribers.
    Abramson, for her part, might have to leave her current job in six years, but she doesn’t see herself ever stopping work. "In terms of my professional life, I always felt a little happy that my husband and I never had much money. I never had to go through the should-l-stay-at-home conversation. I also wanted to work, because I really liked it. " She adds: "They’re gonna have to take me out feet first, or chop off my head. "
The expression "faint of heart"(Line 1, Para. 4)is closest in meaning to

选项 A、female reporters.
B、sensitive personality.
C、frail character.
D、incompetent people.

答案C

解析 语义理解题。根据题干提示定位到第四段第一句。该句说“执掌《纽约时报》从来都不是……的工作”。在接下来的内容中提到了诸多事件,并且在第三段中也提到吉尔看到批评她工作的文章时,只有她自己独自在家。由此可知,吉尔能够从容应对这些困难,不为批评所动,她的个性绝不软弱,因此选[C]。第四段中提到了许多难题,这些难题都不会特别针对女性而出现,故排除[A];第二段中后半部分对于吉尔的许多描述中都没有提到她的性格敏感,故排除[B];没有能力的人在任何岗位都是不适合的,而不仅局限于《纽约时报》主编这一工作,故排除[D]。
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