首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Gorky Park is famous for many things, not many of them good. For Muscovites, their city’s biggest green space used to be known a
Gorky Park is famous for many things, not many of them good. For Muscovites, their city’s biggest green space used to be known a
admin
2012-12-30
40
问题
Gorky Park is famous for many things, not many of them good. For Muscovites, their city’s biggest green space used to be known as a place of regimented Soviet-era fun, full of strolling proletarian families eating cheap ice cream to the sound of military bands. To foreigners, it was the venue of Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 novel of faceless corpses and cutthroat Soviet black marketeering. And then of course there was that Scorpions song—"follow the Moskva, down to Gorky Park, listening to the wind, of chaaaaange, " etc.
To me, it was mostly famous as a place to avoid. As a young reporter for The Moscow Times back in the mid-1990s, I’d nearly been beaten up there by drunken paratroopers. Gorky Park was where poor Muscovites would take cheap dates—a wilderness of garish carnival rides, loud pop music, and overpriced kebabs. Moscow’s Night Wolves biker gang, the local answer to the Hell’s Angels, had their lair in the park’s depths. And you had to pay to go in, despite it being one of the few large public spaces in the capital.
But this summer the "wind of change" has again come to Gorky Park. In place of cheesy funfairs, drunken soldiers, and an apocalyptic wasteland of post-Soviet broken concrete, the park is now full of free-Wi-Fi-using, bicycling, nonalcoholic-mojito-sipping young things catching the late-summer rays. The health-and-safety-defying carnival rides are gone, replaced by rose gardens and fountains. The lawns are strewn with giant beanbags designed for lounging on with a laptop, and in place of the ’90s-era prefab booths, the management has put up wooden reproductions of the original 1930s Constructivist-style kiosks selling juices and sandwiches, but no vodka.
Holy middle class! I thought when I saw all this: Russia maybe does have a shot at becoming a normal, civilized country, rather than a kind of Nigeria with snow.
Let me explain my surprise. Over the last decade and a half, Moscow has been transformed beyond recognition by a tsunami of oil money. The low-rise, once rather low-key, historic downtown has been seeded with vast and garish new residential and retail developments. Tens of thousands of handsome old buildings have been demolished and rebuilt, all with the blessing of Yury Luzhkov, the man who was Moscow’s hyperkinetic mayor from 1992 to 2010.
But despite all the money pouring into City Hall, both officially and unofficially (suffice it to say that Luzhkov’s wife, construction billionaire Elena Baturina, was unembarrassed by her status as Russia’s richest woman), pretty much none of it went into creating more and better public spaces. Indeed the city seemed to do everything to squeeze the public out of as much space as possible, kicking Soviet-era children’s libraries and music schools and pensioners’ clubs out of historic buildings and selling them off. It was even getting impossible to walk down the street as drivers blithely parked on the sidewalks. Indeed there is still no system of parking tickets in the city, which also suffers from some of the world’s worst traffic jams. No—in Luzhkov’s Moscow, beauty, space, and pleasure were commodities to be bought, not given away for free.
Hence my amazement at the new Gorky Park, brainchild of current Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and his appointee as the park’s new director, Sergei Kapkov. Instead of turning the park into a patchwork of fenced-off, money-spinning elitny preserves, Kapkov has created a truly great public space with no other ambition but to improve the quality of life of regular Muscovites.
Of course, this comes with a bit of a caveat: the only people who can afford to forbear making a fast buck are those who’ve made a few fast bucks already. In this case, the godfather of Gorky is oil billionaire Roman Abramovich. Kapkov is a close ally. And Abramovich’s girlfriend, Dasha Zhukova, plans to open a world-class contemporary-arts center in a historic exhibition hall in Gorky Park next year.
It’s not quite public philanthropy on the scale of, say, Andrew Carnegie. But the transformation of Gorky Park is the start of something different from the take-the-money-and-run culture of the ’90s and ’00s. Muscovites realize that they actually have to invest in the city’s public spaces, not just their own private ones.
September’s Moscow Festival of Food, held in Gorky Park, was a perfect example. Some 12, 000 Muscovites, mostly well-heeled professionals rather than the super-rich, gathered to sample local beers, smoked duck breasts, and cheeses. The festival was all about quality rather than quantity, about how to make the best of simple things, about joining the food culture of the world. It was about having a great, civilized life on a normal, professional salary—and that you don’t have to be an oligarch to enjoy the finer things in life. After all, not even the richest oligarch has a Moscow garden as big or beautiful as Gorky Park.
The author’s attitude towards the change of Gorky Park seems to be
选项
A、noncommittal.
B、affirmative.
C、impartial.
D、regretful.
答案
B
解析
态度题。第三段描述了现在Gorky Park发生的变化之后,作者在第四段提及“Holy middleclass!I thought when I saw all this:Russia maybe does have a shot at becoming a normal,civilizedcountry,rather than a kind of Nigeria with snow.”,通常,一个正常的、文明的国度是比穷国更受人民欢迎的,因此可以判断作者的态度是正面的,故[B]为答案。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/QAaO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
Oneofthestrangestthingsaboutdisputeoveradvertisingisthatthegreaterthefussthemuchofamysterytheindustryitsel
Linguistshavefoundthatsignlanguagesandspokenlanguagessharemanyfeatures.Likespokenlanguages,whichuseunitsofsou
MannersnowadaysinmetropolitancitieslikeLondonarepracticallynon-existent.Itisnothingforabig,strongschoolboytoe
I.CausesofBreakdownsin(1)【1】______1.Onstudents’part—insufficientcommandoverthe(2)ofEnglish【2】______—p
______deliveredhisworld-famousspeechGettysburgAddressduringtheCivilWar.
Kidnappingsaroundtheworldhavetypicallyhadoneoftwomajorgoals:publicityforalocalpoliticalcauseorasaformof"f
Kidnappingsaroundtheworldhavetypicallyhadoneoftwomajorgoals:publicityforalocalpoliticalcauseorasaformof"f
WilliamFaulknerwasborninOxford,Miss.Hehad【1】education,thenhejoinedtheBritishRoyalAirForceinCanadabecausehew
WilliamFaulknerwasborninOxford,Miss.Hehad【1】education,thenhejoinedtheBritishRoyalAirForceinCanadabecausehew
AccordingtoOxfordEnglishDictionary,bookis"awrittenorprintedtreatiseorseriesoftreatises,occupyingseveralsheets
随机试题
女,26岁。外伤致胫腓骨骨折,小腿持续性剧烈疼痛。查体:右小腿中段瘀血,肿胀严重,压痛明显,足背动脉搏动微弱。可能出现的严重并发症是()
基础工程划分4个施工过程(挖基槽、作垫层、混凝土浇筑、回填土),在5个施工段组织固定节拍流水施工,流水节拍为3天,要求混凝土浇筑2天后才能进行回填土,该工程的流水施工工期为( )天。
根据《建设工程工程量清单计价规范》(GB50500——2013),采用工程量清单招标的工程,投标人在投标报价时不得作为竞争性费用的是()。
孙某与某科技公司签订劳动合同,双方约定:科技公司派孙某赴美国学习,为其支付培训学费30000美元,差旅费5000美元,回国后孙某为公司服务5年,服务期内,孙某如果擅自离职或辞职,应向公司偿还培训费用,并向公司支付违约金15000元人民币。孙某一回国就受高薪
对()的严重性和危险性的评估须优先考虑。
对新能源、新技术制高点的占领,成为全球汽车产业的竞争_____,这为我国缩短与世界先进水平的差距,提供了_____。依次填入横线部分最恰当的一项是()。
自闭症会影响社会交往、语言交流和兴趣爱好等方面的行为。研究人员发现,实验鼠体内神经连接蛋白的蛋白质如果合成过多,会导致自闭症。由此他们认为,自闭症与神经连接蛋白的蛋白质合成量具有重要关联。以下哪项如果为真,最能支持上述观点?
2010年,我国机电产品出9334.3亿美元,同比增长30.9%:高新技术产品出口4924.1亿美元,同比增长30.7%。船舶、汽车零部件出口保持较快增长,其中船舶出口同比增长44.5%,汽车零部件出口同比增长44.1%。;2010年高新技术产品出口额占出
设有4条路由170.18.129.0/24、170.18.130.0/24、170.18.132.0/24和170.18.133.0/24,如果进行路由汇聚,能覆盖这4条路由的路由是()。
D
最新回复
(
0
)