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  3. As machines go, the car is not terribly noisy, nor terribly polluting, nor terribly dangerous; and on all those dimensions it ha

As machines go, the car is not terribly noisy, nor terribly polluting, nor terribly dangerous; and on all those dimensions it ha

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问题    As machines go, the car is not terribly noisy, nor terribly polluting, nor terribly dangerous; and on all those dimensions it has become better as the century has grown older. The main problem is its prevalence, and the social costs that ensue from the use by everyone of something that would be fairly harmless if, say, only the rich were to use it. It is a price we pay for equality.
   Before becoming too gloomy, it is worth recalling why the car has been arguably the most successful and popular product of the whole of the past 100 years—and remains so. The story begins with the environmental improvement it brought in the 1900s. In New York City in 1900, according to The Car Culture, a 1975 book by J. Flink, a historian, horses deposited 2. 5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine every day. Every year, the city authorities had to remove an average of 15 ,000 dead horses from the streets. It made cars smell of roses.
   Cars were also wonderfully flexible. The main earlier solution to horse pollution and traffic jams was the electric trolley bus. But that required fixed overhead wires, and rails and platforms, which were expensive, ugly , and inflexible. The car could go from any A to any B, and allowed towns to develop in all directions with low-density housing, rather than just being concentrated along the trolley or rail lines. Rural areas benefited too, for they became less remote.
   However, since pollution became a concern in the 1950s, experts have predicted—wrongly—that the car boom was about to end. In his book Mr. Flink argued that by 1973 the American market had become saturated, at one car for every 2. 25 people, and so had the markets of Japan and Western Europe (because of land shortages). Environmental worries and diminishing oil reserves would prohibit mass car use anywhere else.
   He was wrong. Between 1970 and 1990, whereas America’s population grew by 23% , the number of cars on its roads grew by 60%. There is now one car for every 1. 7 people there, one for every 2. 1 in Japan, one for every 5. 3 in Britain. Around 550 million cars are already on the roads, not to mention all the trucks and motorcycles, and about 50 million new ones are made each year worldwide. Will it go on? Undoubtedly, because people want it to.
Mr. Flink argued in his book that cars would not be widely used in other countries because______.
选项 A、the once booming car market has become saturated
B、traffic jams in those countries are getting more and more serious
C、expensive motorways are not available in less developed countries
D、people worry about pollution and the diminishing oil resources
答案D
解析 事实细节题。根据Mr．Flink argued in his book定位于第四段第二句。该句讲美国、日本和欧洲的汽车市场于1973年会饱和。后一句讲到，对环境和日益减少的石油储备的担忧，使得汽车无法在其他地方大量的使用。[D]项的表述符合文义，故为答案。[A]项不是汽车无法在其他地方大量使用的原因，故排除；[B]项和[C]项文中未提及，故也排除。
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