2. 外语
  3. (1)Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx has eight floors, seven gymnasiums, a football field and a planetarium. But there is

(1)Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx has eight floors, seven gymnasiums, a football field and a planetarium. But there is

admin2016-11-03  29
问题     (1)Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx has eight floors, seven gymnasiums, a football field and a planetarium. But there is one place off limits to its more than 3,000 students: the six-lane swimming pool, which has been dry for more than a decade. Flanked by empty bleachers, coated with dust and dimly lighted by a few fluorescent bulbs, whose dull buzzing noise substitutes for splashing and cheering, the pool evokes an aura of eerie loneliness.
    (2)Within the New York City public school system, though, the troubled Truman pool represents a trend. Of the 50 swimming pools tucked inside the city’s 1,200 school buildings, 10 are in unusable condition. At Martin Luther King Jr. High School in Manhattan, the pool, empty since leaks and filtration problems were discovered in 1986, has been used over the years to store old chairs and desks. The pool at Walton High School in the Bronx has been closed since the 1980’s, despite a $54 million schoolwide renovation. Next to Truman’s competitive pool is a smaller practice pool, which is also empty, except for grime, spattered paint and a few cigarette butts.
    (3)For the swimming enthusiasts of the city public school system, the empty school pools are a sad spectacle, hollow symbols of lost opportunities: to combat obesity; to provide summer job training in a city that has had to import lifeguards from Europe in recent years; to entice that subset of students who just may love the water even if they hate everything else about high school. "Swimming kind of puts you in a different frame of mind—there’s noise and laughter, people feeling free and weightless," said Sana Q. Nasser, the principal of Truman. "Here we have a pool that needs a teensy bit to get it going, and to see it empty is heart-wrenching."
    (4)The latest version of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s $13.1 billion, five-year educational capital plan, to be announced in the coming weeks, will include $60 million for upgrades to a dozen school pools, including $7 million for Truman, $5 million for Walton and $4 million for King, said Steven W. Lawitts, senior vice president of the School Construction Authority. "These pools are going to be fixed," Mr. Lawitts said. But the school system’s capital plans have historically called for projects that never end up happening, among them the planned renovation of one of two pools at the George Washington High School campus, in Washington Heights. Also, the mayor’s plan relies on $6.5 billion from the state, which is resisting a court order to give the city schools more money.
    (5)"I would love it to be the case that kids could swim next year at Truman High School," said Eva S. Moskowitz, chairwoman of the City Council Education Committee, whose father swam on the Stuyvesant High School team. "People should not be fooled that simply because the pool repair is in the capital budget it will happen."
    (6)Teachers and principals say that when school pools work, they are oases from whatever troubles may pass in the hallways and classrooms. Tension over test scores and safety concerns dissipates in the smell of chlorine, the creak of diving boards, the splash of the butterfly stroke.
    (7)On the West Side of Manhattan, the purported existence of a pool at Martin Luther King Jr. High School was such a mystery that it inspired an article in The Advocate, a student newspaper on campus. Appearing under the headline "Unlocking MLK’s Secrets," the article was accompanied by a photograph showing old furniture and a television set stacked next to the empty pool. At other schools, the situation is reversed. "The seniors would always tell the freshmen they could go find the pool on the fifth floor," said Adam Kerzner, a Bronx Science swimmer who graduated from the school—which has no fifth floor—in 1997. "It was kind of like a hazing thing." Swim teams representing all eight Staten Island high schools vie for practice time at Curtis High School, the borough’s only public school with a pool. "It’s hectic," said Jim Meraglia, Curtis’s athletic director.
According to the passage, what may be the cause of empty school pools?
选项
答案Shortage of finance．
解析 第4段提到，市长教育计划……最后能否兑现很难预测，因为来源于国家的那部分资金很难得到保证，因此答案为Shortage of finance。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/057O777K
0

专业英语八级

相关试题推荐
随机试题
最新回复(0)