2014届高考英语阅读理解基础测试题 (11).doc

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 asa road in Kesum Purbahari, a slum on the southern edge of New Delhi . On bad days, when there is no electricity for the pumps, the tankers don ’e at all.“ That water kills people, ”a young mother named Shoba said one recent Saturday morning, pointing toa 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 neighborhood . Women often use it to wash clothes and bathe their children, but no ? body is desperate enough to drink it. There is no standard for how much water a person needs each day, but ex? perts usually put the minimum at fifty liters . The government of India promises ( but rarely provides ) forty . Most people drink two or three liters — 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 liters of water each day, more than any other people on earth . Most Europeans use less than half that . The women of Kesum Purbahari each hoped to drag away a hundred liters that day — two or three bu