泛读专八阅读练习TEXT AStill, the image of any city has a half-life of many years
(So does its name, officially changed in from Calcutta to Kolkata, which is closer to what the word sounds like in Bengali
Conversing in English, I never heard anyone call the city anything but Calcutta
) To Westerners, the conveyance most identified with Kolkata is not its modern subway—a facility whose spacious stations have art on the walls and cricket matches on television monitors—but the hand-pulled rickshaw
Stories and films celebrate a primitive-looking cart with high wooden wheels, pulled by someone who looks close to needing the succor of Mother Teresa
For years the government has been talking about eliminating hand-pulled rickshaws on what it calls humanitarian grounds—principally on the ground that, as
