The private car is assumed to have widened our horizons and increased our mobility. When we consider our children’s mobility, th

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问题      The private car is assumed to have widened our horizons and increased our mobility. When we consider our children’s mobility, they can be driven to more places than they could visit without access to a motor vehicle. However, allowing our cities to be dominated by cars has progressively eroded children’s independent mobility. Children have lost much of their freedom to explore their own neighborhood or city without adult supervision.
     Children’s independent access to their local streets may be important for their own personal, mental and psychological development. Allowing them to get to know their own neighborhood and community gives them a ’sense of place’. This depends on active exploration, which is not provided for when children are passengers in cars. Not only is it important that children be able to get to local play areas by themselves, but walking and cycling journeys to school and to other destinations provide genuine play activities in themselves.
     The reduction in children’s freedom may also contribute to a weakening of the sense of local community. As fewer children and adults use the streets as pedestrians(步行), these streets become less sociable places. There is less opportunity for children and adults to have the spontaneous exchanges that help to engender a feeling of community. This in itself may exacerbate(加重) fear associated with assault of children, because there are fewer adults available who know their neighbors’ children, and who can look out for their safety.
     As individuals, parents strive to provide the best upbringing they can for their children. However, in doing so parents may be contributing to a more dangerous environment for children generally. The idea that ’ streets are for cars and back yards and playgrounds are for children is a strongly held belief, and parents have little choice as individuals but to keep their children off the streets if they want to protect their safety.
     In many parts of Dutch cities, and some traffic calmed precincts(区域) in Germany, residential streets are now places where cars must give way to pedestrians.  In these areas, residents are accepting the view that the function of streets is not solely to provide mobility for cars. Streets may also be for social interaction, walking, cycling and playing. One of the most important aspects of these European cities, in terms of giving cities back to children, has been a range of "traffic calming" initiatives, aimed at reducing the volume and speed of traffic. These initiatives have had complex interactive effects, leading to a sense that children have been able to ’ recapture’ their local neighborhood, and more importantly, that they have been able to do this in safety. Recent research has demonstrated that children in many German cities have significantly higher levels of freedom to travel to places in their own neighborhood or city than children in other cities in the world.  
We can learn from the last sentence in the last paragraph that______.

选项 A、the German parents do better in educating children
B、the German children are braver than those in other countries in traveling
C、the German children can do well without the supervision of parents
D、traffic calming initiatives function well in German for children’s development

答案D

解析 根据题干定位到原文最后一段最后一句。文章最后一句指出:研究发现德国很多城市的孩子在自己家附近或所在城市旅行的自由程度要比世界其他城市的孩子高,再结合前面关于“交通安静区”的介绍说明,可知“交通安静区”的倡议在德国对孩子们的发展起了很好的作用,故D项正确。
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