2. 考研
  3. [1] To say that the city is a central problem of American life is simply to know that increasingly the cities are American life;

[1] To say that the city is a central problem of American life is simply to know that increasingly the cities are American life;

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问题    [1] To say that the city is a central problem of American life is simply to know that increasingly the cities are American life; just as urban living is becoming the condition of man across the world. Everywhere men and women crowd into cities in search of employment, a decent living, the company of their fellows, and the excitement and stimulation of urban life.
    [2] Within a very few years, 80 percent of all Americans will live in cities — the great majority of them in concentrations like those which stretch from Boston to Washington, and outward from Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and St. Louis. The cities are the nerve system of economic life for the entire Nation, and for much of the world.
    [3] And each of our cities is now the seat of nearly all the problems of American life: poverty and race hatred, stunted education and saddened lives, and the other ills of the new urban Nation — congestion and filth, danger and purposelessness — which afflict all but the very rich and the very lucky.
    [4] ...The city is not just housing and stores. It is not just education and employment, parks and theaters, banks and shops. It is a place where men should be able to live in dignity and security and harmony, where the great achievements of modern civilization and the ageless pleasures afforded by natural beauty should be available to all. If this is what we want — and this is what we must want if men are to be free for that "pursuit of happiness" which was the earliest promise of the American Nation — we will need more than poverty programs, housing programs, and employment programs, although we will need all of these. We will need an outpouring of imagination, ingenuity, discipline, and hard work unmatched since the first adventurers set out to conquer the wilderness. For the problem is the largest we have ever known. And we confront an urban wilderness more formidable and resistant and in some ways more frightening than the wilderness faced by the pilgrims or the pioneers.
    [5] One great problem is sheer growth — growth which crowds people into slums, thrusts suburbs out over the countryside, burdens to the breaking point all our old ways of thought and action — our systems of transport and water supply and education, and our means of raising money to finance these vital services.
    [6] A second is destruction of the physical environment, stripping people of contact with sun and fresh air, clean rivers, grass and trees — condemning them to a life among stone and concrete, neon lights and an endless flow of automobiles. This happens not only in the central city, but in the very suburbs where people once fled to find nature. "There is no police so effective," said Emerson, "as a good hill and a wide pasture... where the boys...can dispose of their superfluous strength and spirits." We cannot restore the pastures, but we must provide a chance to enjoy nature, a chance for recreation, for pleasure and for some restoration of that essential dimension of human existence which flows only from man’s contact with the natural world around him.
    [7] A third is the increasing difficulty of transportation — adding concealed, unpaid hours to the workweek, removing men from the social and cultural amenities that are the heart of the city; sending destructive swarms of automobiles across the city, leaving behind them a band of concrete and a poisoned atmosphere. And sometimes — as in Watts — our surrender to the automobile has so crippled public transport that thousands literally cannot afford to go to work elsewhere in the city.
    [8] A fourth destructive force is the concentrated poverty and racial tension of the urban ghetto — a problem so vast that the barest recital of its symptoms is profoundly shocking:
    Segregation is becoming the governing rule; Washington is only the most prominent example of a city which has become overwhelmingly Negro as whites move to the suburbs; many other cities are moving along the same road — for example, Chicago, which, if present trends continue, will be over 50 percent Negro by 1975. The ghettoes of Harlem and Southside and Watts are cities in themselves, areas of as much as 350, 000 people.
    Poverty and unemployment are endemic: from one-third of the families in these areas live in poverty, in some, male unemployment may be as high as 40 percent; unemployment of Negro youths nationally is over 25 percent.
    Welfare and dependency are pervasive: one-fourth of the children in these ghettoes, as in Harlem, may receive Federal Aid to Dependent Children; in New York City, ADC alone costs over $ 20 million a month; in our five largest cities, the ADC bill’s over $ 500 million a year.
Housing is overcrowded, unhealthy, and dilapidated: the last housing census found 43 percent of urban Negro housing to be substandard; in these ghettoes, over 10, 000 children may be injured or infected by rat bites every year.
    Education is segregated, unequal, and inadequate: the high school dropout rate averages nearly 70 percent, there are academic high schools in which less than 3 percent of the entering students will graduate with an academic diploma.
    Health is poor and care inadequate: infant mortality in the ghettoes is more than twice the rate outside, mental retardation among Negroes caused by inadequate prenatal care is more than seven times the white rate; one-half of all babies born in Manhattan last year will have had no prenatal care at all; deaths from diseases like tuberculosis, influenza, and pneumonia are two to three times as common as elsewhere.
    [9] Fifth is both cause and consequence of all the rest. It is the destruction of the sense, and often the fact, of community, of human dialog, the thousand invisible strands of common experience and purpose, affection and respect which tie men to their fellows. Community is expressed in such words as neighborhood, civic pride, friendship. It provides the life-sustaining force of human warmth and security, a sense of one’s own human significance in the accepted association and companionship of others.
    [10] ...Community demands a place where people can see and know each other, where children can play and adults work together and join in the pleasures and responsibilities of the place where they live. The whole history of the human race, until today, has been the history of community. Yet, this is disappearing, and disappearing at a time when its sustaining strength is badly needed. For other values which once gave strength for the daily battle of life are also being eroded.
    [11] The widening gap between the experience of the generations in a rapidly changing world has weakened the ties of family; children grow up in a world of experience and culture their parents never knew.
    [12] The world beyond the neighborhood has become more impersonal and abstract. Industry and great cities, conflicts between nations and the conquests of science move relentlessly forward, seemingly beyond the reach of individual control or even understanding.
    [13] ...But of all our problems, the most immediate and pressing, the one which threatens to paralyze our very capacity to act, to obliterate our vision of the future, is the plight of the Negro of the center city. For this plight and the riots which are its product and symptom — threaten to divide Americans for generations to come; to add to the ever-present difficulties of race and class the bitter legacy of violence and destruction and fear....
    [14] It is therefore of the utmost importance that these hearings go beyond the temporary measures thus far adopted to deal with riots — beyond the first hoses and the billy clubs; and beyond even sprinklers on fire hydrants and new swimming pools as well. These hearings must start us along the road toward solutions to the underlying conditions which afflict our cities, so that they may become the places of fulfillment and ease, comfort and joy, the communities they were meant to be.
According to the author, the city should be______.
选项 A、the seat of nearly all the problems of American life
B、just houses, stores, schools, businesses, parks, and theaters
C、place where people can live in dignity and security and harmony
D、the nerve system of political, economic, cultural life for much of the world
答案C
解析 事实细节题。第四段第三句提到，城市应该是一个使人们能活得体面、安全、和睦的地方，[C]项是对该句的同义转述，故为答案。第三段第一句提到，我们的城市现在几乎是所有美国生活问题的温床，由此可排除[A]项。第四段前两句提到，城市不应仅仅提供住房、商店、教育、就业、公园、剧院、银行和商店，由此可排除[B]项。第二段提到波士顿、华盛顿等城市是美国乃至世界上大部分地区经济生活的神经系统，并未提到城市应成为世界上大部分地区政治、经济、文化生活的神经系统，故排除[D]项。
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