Section A Directions: In this section, there
is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete statements. Read the passage
carefully. Then answer the questions or complete the statements in the fewest
possible words. Please write your answers on Answer Sheet 2.
After the earthquake, the text messages came streaming in to
4636 - reports of trapped people, fires, polluted water sources, and requests
for food, water and medical supplies. Hundreds of volunteers translated them
from Creole and French into English, tagged them with a location and passed them
on to aid agencies on the ground. Yet not one of the volunteers was anywhere
near Haiti. The 4636 texting service is part of a new generation
of web-based efforts to help disaster relief that has emerged from the
revolution in texting, social networking and crowdsourcing. Its impact on the
ground is tangible (确凿的). For example, a Haitian clinic texted 4636 that it was
running low on fuel for its generator. Within 20 minutes the Red Cross said it
would resupply. 4636 is run by a small organization called
Ushahidi.com, originally set up in Kenya to gather reports of violence after the
2008 election. Within days of the earthquake on 12 January that flattened
Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince and numerous surrounding towns, it had set up a
Haitian operation and recruited hundreds of volunteers to help translate
messages, many of them Haitians living in the U.S. The service is free, courtesy
of Digicell, Haiti’s largest mobile network operator, which had 70 per cent of
its network running within 24 hours of the quake. Nicolas di
Tada, who helped set up 4636 on the ground in the first days after the disaster,
says that was the easy part. "The challenge was making responders on the ground
aware of us." A stroke of luck made a big difference. One of the first texts was
from a hospital which had 200 beds, and doctors, nurses and medical supplies on
standby, but no patients, because hardly any relief agencies knew they were
there. Forwarding that message on told a large number of organization about
4636. Now, radio stations help spread the word. As people
generally don’t send messages to say their request has been fulfilled, Ushahidi
has no way of knowing how successful it has been. Still, "the system is
unprecedented," says Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, director of the Center for
Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. According Nicolas di Tada, the difficult part of work for 4636 Haitian operation is
__________.