2. 外语
  3. Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Queens, from New Jersey— race in the dark over bridges a

Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Queens, from New Jersey— race in the dark over bridges a

admin2012-03-23  19
问题     Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Queens, from New Jersey— race in the dark over bridges and through tunnels and converge at the intersection of West and Verse Streets, where One World Trade Center is going up. Concrete is perishable, A load will spoil in ninety minutes once it has left the hatching plant. The trucks pull up to the construction site. They dump their loads into big baskets with hydraulic pumping systems. Eleven thousand three hundred tons of superstructure steel are waiting. The other day, Chris Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority, which is supervising the project, stood three hundred feet in the air, on what will be the twentieth of One World Trade Center’s hundred and four floors, and said, "This site will be understood by the public on how well this tower rises, but the real metric is how quickly the concrete gets poured. " Toward the building’s core, where office workers will one day ride elevators, members of Local 46 of the Metallic Lathers and Reinforcing Ironworkers union were torch-cutting rebar. Sparks flew. Below, tiny fluorescent-vested figures trundled dollies and hoisted planks in what looked like a scene from "Fraggle Rock. "
    Ward, who is fifty-five, took the Port Authority job in May of 2008. He inherited a huge, politically impossible mess: nineteen public agencies,  two developers,  a hundred and one contractors,  and thirty-three architects have stakes in the World Trade Center redevelopment project. Ward’s first act was to order a reevaluation of the plans for the site. Thanks to him, a memorial will be completed in time for the tenth anniversary of September 11th—sooner than it might have been, but, for a lot of people, not soon enough. Ward wears a blue suit and speaks like a technocrat, but his handshake is a crusher and he knows his girders. He didn’t like the name Freedom Tower—as One World Trade Center was originally called—any more than anyone else did. He said, "That sense that New York needs a new downtown, that we need to defeat the terrorists—was it inevitable, that language? I don’t know, but I can understand why it happened. "
    He is concerned that large-scale, sentimental thinking—"monumentalism," he calls it—has paralyzed the rebuilding process. "The political rhetoric, the sense that New York had to do everything huge at one time, obscured the construction reality," he said. He pointed out some steel bundles, dangling from a crane,  and explained how the speeded-up schedule for the memorial affected the sequencing of PATH service, which affected the building of the "1 box"—the pod that encases the tracks of the No. 1 train, which runs directly through the site—which, in turn, affected the building of Larry Silverstein’s Three World Trade Center. To Ward,  the site is a delicate,  mutating mesh of counterweighted considerations—a high-stakes game of pickup sticks.
    New York is not Dubai. "People always say, ’How come One World Trade Center is taking so long? The Empire State Building was built in fifteen months,’ " Ward said. "Yeah, well, people forget that five people died building the Empire State Building. " He noted that, while Dubai "can literally rip up and relocate an entire town," plans for a floating swimming-pool barge in city waters were delayed for years because of red tape. Walking, on ground level, through dirt and nails—but little garbage—he spotted the looming jackknife of the new Goldman Sachs tower, at 200 West Street. "People say, ’This Goldman Sachs building got built in four years. Why is One World Trade Center taking so long? ’ Well, one reason is that this is getting built on top of a PATH train, and Goldman Sachs got built on top of a fucking parking lot !"
    The memorial is starting to come together. Standing on a concrete platform facing north, you can envision water gushing from spigots, which have been provisionally duct-taped in place, and rushing down thirty-foot granite walls into a pair of reflecting pools. The other day, workers were affixing slabs of granite to the wails.
    In mid-May, construction on One World Trade Center reached the twentieth floor, or what is called the "typical office floor"—the point beyond which the rest of the stories are easily replicated—and the hope is that, from now on, the building will rise about a floor every ten days.
    "It’s thrilling when you see it, but it’s nerve-racking," Ward said. "The margin for error in this town is tough. "
The word "nerve-racking" in the last paragraph probably means
选项 A、disturbing.
B、confusing.
C、demanding.
D、frightening.
答案A
解析 语义题。由题干定位至最后一段。从“It’s thrilling when you see it，but it’s nerve-racking”中的but可以看出nerve-racking表达了某种负面情绪，“The margin for error in this town is tough”是对这种情绪的解释，在建造世贸中心的过程中不能出什么错会让人焦虑不安，心神不定，这符合常识，故[A]为答案。[C]具有较强干扰性，demanding意为“费力的”，与[A]不同的是，demanding是指工作本身很困难，而disturbing是指人的感受，从前面的thrilling可以看出，这里谈论的是自己的感觉，故排除[C]；Ward并没有什么问题解决不了，[B]无依据；而[D]语体色彩过于浓重，与The margin for error in this town is tough给人的感觉不符，排除。
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