高中英语教学：A Sea of Bodies_ How a Festive Night in Seoul Turned Deadly.docx

A Sea of Bodies: How a Festive Night in Seoul Turned Deadly By Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Paul Mozur, Victoria Kim, Lee Su-Hyun and Jin Yu Young @ The New York Times SEOUL-- It was supposed to be a festive evening, throngs of raucous youngsters dressed as zombies, princesses and super heroes converging on one of Seoul’s most popular nightlife districts for their first restriction-free Halloween celebration since the pandemic began. Last Saturday evening, they crowded into bar and nightclubs pumping out the latest k-pop hits and spilled out into the tight alleys that wind through the city’s Itaewon neighborhood. They snacked on the Greek, Turkish, Italian and other international foods for which the diverse district is known. As the night grew more frenetic and the mass of revelers swelled, many of them crammed into an alleyway barely 11 feet wide, in a bottleneck of human traffic that made it difficult to breathe and move. There were few police officers around, and from within the crowd came calls to “push, push” and a big shove, according to witnesses. Then, they began to fall, a tangle of too many bodies, compressed into too small of a space. Zen Ogren, 32, found herself stuck in a packed and sweltering club alongside the narrow alleyway. Outside the club’s door, people were yelling, “Please don’t come out, people are dying,” she said. Security guards urged the crowds to not jostle, but many pushed forward, stepping on top of those who had fallen. “They just wanted to go out,” Ms. Ogren said. In the end, more than 150 people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, died, crushed under the surge of the crowd. The tragedy — one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters — and questions about the authorities’ responsibility to manage the crowd, has marred the image of South Korea, a thriving technology and pop-culture powerhouse that is chronically prone to man-made disasters. It has also added to political woes of the country’s beleaguered president, Yoon Suk Yeol, alread