In the late 1960s, many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems , and new steel-and-glass skysc

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问题     In the late 1960s, many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems , and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized. Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities.
    Skyscrapers are also lavish consumers, and wasters, of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120,000 kilowatts—enough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
    Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful. The heat loss(or gain)through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times than through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double-glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.
    Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city’ s sanitation facilities, too. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2. 25 million gallons of raw sewage each year as much as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut, which has a population of more than 109,000.
    Skyscrapers also interfere with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. In Boston in the 1960s, some people even feared that shadows from skyscrapers would kill the grass on Boston Common.
    Still, people continue to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built them— personal ambition, civic pride, and the desire of owners to have the largest possible amount of rentable space.
According to the passage, which aspect of skyscrapers were some residents of Boston concerned with in the late 1960s?

选项 A、The poor reception of radio and TV signals.
B、The removal of trees and grass from building sites.
C、The harmful effects on the city’ s plants.
D、The obstruction of air traffic.

答案C

解析 文章倒数第二段的最后一句说到“波士顿的一些人担心高楼造成的阴影会使小草无法生存。”也就是说,高楼会遮挡住阳光,从而使当地的植物得不到阳光的照射而无法生长。
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