题目内容
Charley Foley calls into the Mater Misericordia Hospital to visit his wife. "How are you feeling" he asks, sitting at the bedside, close to Dolly who is smiling up at him, her black hair resting against the white pillows. "I’m fine," Dolly says, quietly. She looks old and tired to Charley; she is deathly pale and has black pouches under her eyes. When she slips her fingers into Charley’s he notices two ugly brown liver spots on the back of her small hand. "You look tired," Charley says. " Aren’t you sleeping" "I was a bit restless last night. " Dolly does not mention the pain: she doesn’t want to upset her husband. "Any word from Linda" she asks. "She phoned again last night. I told her you were grand. I said there was nothing to worry about. " Linda, their eldest, teaches in a university in Galway. Linda will come home for the holiday in August. Their son, Colin, and his children live in Australia. Cohn hasn’t been told that his mother is unwell. Colm’s a worrier: it’s best he’s not upset. Charley gazes dreamily across the chattering hospital ward, bright with pale afternoon sunlight. Other visitors are doing their duties, gathering around the sick, bringing flowers and fruit, offering words of hope and comfort. " Have you seen the doctor again" Charley asks his wife. "Tomorrow maybe. " "Any idea how long they’ll keep you in" Dolly turns away and coughs into a tissue, then settles back. She takes Charley’s hand again. "They’ll let me know on Monday. They have to do lots more tests. They won’t let me home until they know. I’m song to be such a bother. " Dolly’s small chest heaves under her heavy nightdress. Charley thinks of a frightened bird. Sweet Dolores Delarosa he used to call her long ago when they were courting, mocking her sorrowful eyes and the way she took everything too seriously. He can’t help wondering if she made herself sick with worry. Poor Dolly Delarosa! "Don’t let them budge you until you’re absolutely better," he says. "Are you managing all right, darling" "Grand. " Charley is eating out and staying away from the house as much as possible. He’s managing all right. The minutes pass in heated tedium. Charley is watching the visitors and glancing at the small alarm clock beside his wife’s bed. He can hear its distant ticking and still recall the irritating ring when it dragged his wife from bed at the crack of dawn and moments later her breakfast sounds clattering in the kitchen keeping him awake, reminding him that there’s a day’s work ahead and children to be schooled and fed. The kids are all grown up now. Second grandchild is imminent. Time is running out. A grey face in the shaving rein’or reminds Charley of middle age and the rot ahead. Where’s the point in having money if you can’t enjoy it Why can’t clocks take their time What’s the hurry Ah—God have mercy! Dolly Dolorosa. How different might it have been without her Dolly’s eyelids droop. Her mouth opens a fraction. She looks almost dead. Moments pass slowly. "This must be very boring for you," she says, without opening her eyes. "Not at all. It does me good to see you. " "It’s not nice having to visit anybody in hospital. It’s so depressing. " "Nonsense. " Dolly settles her dark head further back against the white pillows. Grimaces for an instant then braves a smile. "You should leave now, Charley. I think I might sleep for a while. " "Are you sure" "Positive. " Charley bounces to his feet. "I’ll come in later," he says. "Please don’t. With it being Saturday the wards will be crammed with people. Leave it till the morning. Come after Mass. " "Is that what you want" "It is, darling. " Doily opens her eyes, smiles like a child. It’s been a long time since Dolly was a child. "You look tired, darling," she says. "Aren’t you sleeping" "I was a bit restless last night. " "Try to take things easy. " Dolly squeezes her husband’s hand; presses her ringed finger against his gold wedding ring. Her fingers are light as feathers. "Off you go, darling," she says. "Try to not worry. " Charley bends and kisses Dolly’s hot forehead. "I’ll see you tomorrow," he says. Dolly’s eyes close. Her fingers slip from his. Charley walks along a polished corridor and finds the exit. Outside in the bright ear park he locates his car and sits inside. He glances around at the visitors coming and going. Nurses walk past, reminding him of butterflies. Which of the following adjectives does not describe Dolly
查看答案
搜索结果不匹配？点我反馈
更多问题
When does the plane take off（）
Who found out that paper could be made from trees
The past few years have been busy ones for human-rights organisations. In prosecuting the so-called war on terror, many governments in Western countries where freedoms seemed secure have been tempted to nibble away at them. Just as well, you might suppose, that doughty campaigners such as Amnesty International exist to leap to the defense. Yet Amnesty no longer makes the splash it used to in the rich world. This is not for want of speaking out. The organization is as vocal as it ever was. But some years ago it decided to follow intellectual fashion and dilute a traditional focus on political rights by mixing in a new category of what people now call social and economic rights. Rights being good things, you might suppose that the more of them you campaign for the better. Why not add pressing social and economic concerns to stuffy old political rights such as free speech, free elections and due process of law What use is a vote if you are starving Are not access to jobs, housing, health care and food basic rights too No: few rights are truly universal, and letting them multiply weakens them. Food, jobs and housing are certainly necessities. But no useful purpose is served by calling them "rights". When a government locks someone up without a fair trial, the victim, perpetrator and remedy are pretty clear. This clarity seldom applies to social and economic "rights". It is hard enough to determine whether such a right has been infringed, let alone who should provide a remedy, or how. Who should be educated in which subjects for how long at what cost in taxpayers’ money is a political question Best settled at the ballot Box. So is how much to spend on what kind of health care. And no economic system known to man guarantees a proper job for everyone all the time: even the Soviet Union’s much-boasted full employment was based on the principle "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work". It is hardly an accident that the countries keenest to use the language of social and economic rights tend to be those that show least respect for rights of the traditional sort. The rulers of some countries habitually depict campaigns concentrating on individual freedoms as a conspiracy by the rich northern hemisphere to do down poor countries. It is mightily convenient, if you deprive your citizens of political liberties, to portray these as a bourgeois luxury. And it could not be further from the truth. For people in the poor world, as for people everywhere, the most reliable method yet invented to ensure that governments provide people with social and economic necessities is called politics. That is why the rights that make open politics possible—free speech, due process, protection from arbitrary punishment—are so precious. Insisting on their enforcement is worth more than any number of grandiloquent but unenforceable declarations demanding jobs, education and housing for all. Many do-goading outfits suffer from baying too broad a focus and too narrow a base. Amnesty used to be the other way round, appealing to people of all political persuasions and none, and concentrating on a hard core of well-defined basic liberties. No longer. By trying in recent years to borrow moral authority from the campaigns and leaders of the past and lend it to the woollier cause of social reform, Amnesty has succeeded only in muffling what was once its central message, at the very moment when governments in the West need to hear it again. Which of the following might conclude the main idea of the passage
Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize for economics, has spent much of his intellectual life studying slumps of a different kind. The Depression, which cost both of his parents their jobs, was exacerbated by the monetary, authorities, who kept too tight a grip on the money supply. Mr. Phelps is interested in unemployment that even open-handed central bankers cannot cure. Most scholars stand on the shoulders of giants. But Mr. Phelps won his laurels in part tar kicking the feet from under his intellectual forerunners. In 1958 William Phillips, of the London School of Economics, showed that for much of the previous hundred years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. Economists were too quick to conclude that policy makers therefore faced a grand, macroeconomic trade-off, embodied in the so-called "Phillips curve". They could settle for unemployment of, say, 6% and an inflation rate of 1%—as prevailed in America at the start of the 1960s—or they could quicken the economy, cutting unemployment by a couple of percentage points at the expense of inflation of 3% or so—which is roughly how things stood in America when Mr. Phelps published his first paper on the subject in 1967. In such a tight lab our market, companies appease workers by offering higher wages. They then pass on the cost in the form of dearer prices, cheating workers of a higher real wage. Thus policymakers can engineer lower unemployment only through deception. But "man is a thinking, expectant being,"as Mr. Phelps has put it. Eventually workers will cotton on, demanding still higher wages to offset the rising cost of living. They can be duped for as long as inflation stays one step ahead of their rising expectations of what it will be. The stable trade-off depicted by the Phillips curve is thus a dangerous mirage. The economy will recover its equilibrium only when workers’ expectations are fulfilled, prices turn out as anticipated, and they no longer sell their labour under false pretences. But equilibrium does not, sadly, imply full employment. Mr. Phelps argued that inflation will not settle until unemployment rises to its "natural rate", leaving some workers moldering on the shelf. Given economists’ almost theological commitment to the notion that markets clear, the presence of unemployment in the world requires a theodicy to explain it. Mr. Phelps is willing to entertain several. But in much of his work he contends that unemployment is necessary to cow workers, ensuring their loyalty to the company and their diligence on the job, at a wage the company can afford to pay. "Natural" does not mean optimal. Nor, Mr. Phelps has written, does it mean "a pristine element of nature not susceptible to intervention by man. " Natural simply means impervious to central bankers’ efforts to change it, how much money they print. Economists, including some of his own students, commonly take this natural rate to be slow moving, if not constant, and devote a great deal of effort to estimating it. Mr. Phelps, by contrast, has been more anxious to explain its fluctuations, and to recommend measures to lower it. His book Structural Slumps, published in 1994, is an ambitious attempt to provide a general theory of how the natural rate of unemployment evolves. Some of the factors that he considered important--unemployment benefits or payroll taxes, for example—are widely accepted parts of the story. Others are more idiosyncratic. He and his French collaborator, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, have, for example, blamed Europe’s mounting unemployment in the 1980s in part on Ronald Reagan’s budget deficits, which were expansionary at home, but squeezed employment in the rest of the world. A few years ago David Walsh, an economic journalist, lamented that the glare of the Nobel Prize left other equally deserving economists, such as Mr. Phelps, languishing "in the half-lit penumbra of the shortlist". After an unaccountably long lag, professional acclaim for this bold, purposeful theorist finally converged on its natural rate. Which of the following statements is CORRECT about Mr. Phelps’s natural rate
微信支付 
支付宝支付