英语六级模拟试卷(30)--阅读2

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2007:09:18 12:01:52
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

Passage Two
Questions 26 to 30 are based on the following passage:

Most of the larger cities in the world have grown without plans and blueprints. London is such a city. Its streets zigzag, snake, and circle. There is no reason or order to its street-numbering system. Indeed, no one but a veteran taxi driver knows the whole of London. And before he gets his cabbie’s license he must first tour the city for months, street by street, then take a comprehensive examination to prove that he can find his way about. New York and Chicago grew in much the same way. They just in spread out, pushed by the demands for residential, business, or industrial space. Like spilled water, they expanded in all directions. Today in New York, even a native-born Manhattanite despairs of finding his way around Brooklyn.There are a few modern cities, however, that were created out of nothing. They were built strictly by the book according to detailed plans that will also control future growth. Two such American cities are Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia. But the prime example of a city planned and built from scratch in the twentieth century is Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil.

Brasilia was the brain child of Brazil’s President Juscelino Kubitschek, who held office from 1955 to 1960. Kubitschek, like other Brazilian leaders, was concerned that most of Brazil’s people were crammed into its seacoast cities. Rio de Janeiro, then the nation’s capital and its second largest city, occupies a breathtakingly beautiful site on the Atlantic coast. Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, is very near the coast. Consequently, this meant that riches in timber, minerals, and hydroelectric power sources in the interior of the country were untapped. Recognizing that drastic action was needed to develop the interior, Kubitschek decided to build a brand new capital city in the Brazilian Highlands, 600 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro. He chose a site that was right in the middle of the wilderness, on land that had never even been plowed.

Ready for business in 1960, Brasilia was an architect’s delight and a planner’s dream. Its public buildings, monuments, and high-rise apartment complexes were magnificently modern. Access roads fed into its streets with no traffic lights. Every feature seemed logical, reasonable, and right. But for more than a decade, Brasilia seemed all wrong to the people brought there to live and to work in government offices. While it was undeniably a beautiful city, it was not yet a community.

For it is people and their history of habitation that turn a city from a collection of streets and buildings into a community. It is people who give a city life and character and personality—and a brand-new, tailor-made Brasilia didn’t have those qualities for a long time. But now, happily, its residents no longer feel they need to rush back to Rio or Sao Paulo at every opportunity. Instead, they visit, picnic, and enjoy one another’s company. Brasilia is beginning to feel like home to them.Other planned cities have faced the same problem of creating a community spirit and identity. Some observers of life in Columbia, Maryland, another planned city, have been concerned with lack of spirit there and have made an interesting comparison between Columbia and Hoboken, New Jersey. Hoboken, an old waterfront town just across the Hudson River from New York City, is an urban planner’s nightmare. It has row upon row of old dingy buildings, and grass and tree are few and far between. Columbia, on the other hand, is an urban planner’s dream. It has charming colonial and modern houses on winding streets. There are lovely lawns and beautiful trees. And there are bicycle paths and hundreds of acres of woods, meadows, and lakes. 

Yet something is not quite right. Many Hoboken children are almost fiercely loyal to one another and their community. They may not have lawns and lakes, but they find ways to have fun on the pavements and sidewalks. In Columbia, by contrast, many of the young people seem listless. As one teenager from Detroit put it, “In Detroit it seemed like something was always happening. But here”. And he shrugged his shoulders.