第一节（共 15 小题；每小题 2 分，满分 30 分）
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的 A、B、C 和 D 四个选项中，选出最佳选项。
A
When Smith moved from California to the Catskill mountains in New York in 2019, the self-employed journalist became his town’s newest volunteer firefighter at the age of 65.
It was Smith’s eye for a story that first made him notice the issue facing volunteer fire departments. “Speaking to fire chiefs, I realised they are in crisis since more than 60% of all firefighters in the US are volunteers, and rural areas can’t get young people to join,” he says. “The chief was trying to engage me as soon as I hit town and said that it didn’t matter about my age as there is a job for everyone.”
Smith signed up to train as an external firefighter, which meant he only dealt with fires from outside the burning structures rather than potentially running inside buildings to rescue people. “The external firefighting training owned my life for three months, with night classes and Saturday courses covering everything from operating a pump (泵) panel to throwing ladders,” he says. “We started every class with a ‘dressing drill’, racing to put 40lb (18kg) of equipment on in under a minute. We sometimes had to do it four or five times and I couldn’t walk steadily by the end. It immediately improved my fitness.”
