The survivor !
Listening exercise
You can just concentrate and listen or
look at the text and listen at the same time.
You should do it more than once, but of course, nobody is watching you, so it's entirely up to you...
September 12
Ash Wednesday. The debris — the paper and sooty dust — had surged up the avenues and stopped at Duane Street. [...] Her first [feeling] was that he was at least a day late. Yesterday morning, and well into the afternoon, thousands had made this same march up West Broadway, fleeing the tilting plume of smoke, covered in the same gray ash, slogging through it as the cerulean sky rained paper down on them. [...]
He paused to lean against a Mercedes coated with the same dust, a yellow respirator dangling from his neck like a talisman, the creases of his face highlighted by the gray powder. [...]
His knees showed through the ripped legs of what until recently had been a pair of dress slacks. The hard hat looked anomalous, and indeed, as he tilted his head back, it fell to the curb, exposing a dark tangle of hair, streaked with the ubiquitous talcy ash.
Corrine approached slowly, afraid she might scare him, a little spooked herself—the street and sidewalks deserted, as if they were the last two people on earth. "Are you... all right`?"
Corrine held out a bottle of Evian; she was just about to give up, when he raised his hand and reached for it. Both his hands were raw and bloodied, seeping wounds still wet beneath the dusty grime.
After draining the bottle, he seemed to take note of his surroundings, turning his head in both directions before finally looking back at Corrine. [...]
"You're the first person I've seen," he finally said. She supposed he was in shock or something. [...] "Unless I'm imagining you."
"No, no," she said. "At least I don't think you are. It's hard to tell, though. What's real, I mean"
"Can you still smell it here?" he asked.
"The smoke?" Corrine nodded, looking up at the milky plume that arced south by southwest above the office buildings of Broadway.
"Have you been... diggings?"
He wet his lips and looked back down in the direction from which he'd come. "I was supposed to meet my friend Guillermo at Windows on the World."
She nodded encouragingly. "Yesterday?"