45.
Which of the following words can best describe Amsterdam as a tourist city?
A.
Modern B. Quiet C.
Delightful D. Historic
B
Most
mornings, the line begins to form at dawn: scores of silent women with babies
on their backs, buckets balanced on their heads, and in each hand a bright-blue
plastic jug. On good days, they will wait less than an hour before a water
tanker goes across the dirt path that serves as a road in Kesum Prubahari, a slum
on the southern edge of New Delhi.
On bad days, when there is no electricity for the pumps, the tankers don’t come
at all. “That water kills people,” a young mother named Shoba said one recent
Saturday morning, pointing to a row of pails filled with thick, caramel(焦糖)– colored liquid.
“Whoever drinks it will die.” The water was from a pipe shared by thousands of
people in the poor neighbourhood. Women often use it to wash clothes and bathe
their children, but nobody is desperate enough to drink it.
There
is no standard for how much water a person needs each day, but experts usually
put the minimum at fifty litres. The government of India promises(but rarely
provides)forty. Most people drink two or three litres – less than it
takes to wash a toilet. The rest is typically used for cooking and bathing.
Americans consume between four hundred and six hundred litres of water each
day, more than any other people on earth. Most Europeans use less than half
that. The women of Kesum Purbahari each hope to drag away a hundred litres that
day-two or three
buckets’ worth. Shoba has a husband and five children, and that much water
doesn’t go far in a family of seven, particularly when the temperature reaches
a hundred and ten degrees before noon. She often makes up the difference with
bottled water, which costs more than water delivered any other way. Sometimes
she just buys milk; it’s cheaper. Like the poorest people everywhere, the
people of New Delhi’s
slums spend a far greater percentage of their incomes on water than anyone
lucky enough to live in a house connected to a system of pipes.