2. 外语
  3. (1) Fifteen-hundred rubbish bins fill a room that stretches the length of an entire city block. Each one of the 60-gallon contai

(1) Fifteen-hundred rubbish bins fill a room that stretches the length of an entire city block. Each one of the 60-gallon contai

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问题     (1) Fifteen-hundred rubbish bins fill a room that stretches the length of an entire city block. Each one of the 60-gallon containers is neatly labelled and arrayed in a perfect line. Each holds the possessions of a homeless person or family. The facility, fittingly called The Bin, was set up by Chrysalis, a charity, to provide free storage for those living on the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles.
    (2) There are few harsher vistas of America’s homelessness problem than this neighbourhood, which adjoins a flourishing downtown and arts district. The city says that 4,800 homeless people live there, of whom 23％ have an addiction and 43％ have a mental illness. They are a fraction of the 50,000 homeless people estimated to live in the Los Angeles area, who are seen not just in Skid Row but also on the bustling pier (凸式码头) of Santa Monica and along Venice Beach, where a peaceful-looking woman in her 50s wears plastic bags for shoes and a young man clothed in too many layers gestures to himself on the sand.
    (3) Despite significant public efforts, such as a surcharge on sales tax directed entirely towards homeless services and a $1.2bn bond issue to pay for affordable housing, the problem of homelessness is worsening in Los Angeles. Though it can be found everywhere, homelessness, unlike other social pathologies, is not a growing national problem. Rather it is an acute and worsening condition in America’s biggest, most successful cities.
    (4) On the surface the problem of homelessness looks tough. This prompts policy misadventures. The White House once intervened in California’s homelessness problem. However, the suggestions they floated—more arrests, and warehousing those living on the streets in unused aeroplane hangars—would not have been helpful. The real aim seemed to be more to embarrass prominent Democrats than to help. Around the same time, the Council of Economic Advisors put out a report suggesting that spending on shelters would incentivise homelessness.
    (5) The pessimism is the result of three widely believed myths. The first is that the typical homeless person has lived on the street for years, while dealing with addiction, mental illness, or both. In fact, only 35％ of the homeless have no shelter, and only one-third of those are classified as chronically homeless. The overwhelming majority of America’s homeless are in some sort of temporary shelter paid for by charities or government. Most imagine the epicentre of the American homeless epidemic to be San Francisco, where there are 6,900 homeless people, of whom 4,400 live outdoors, instead of New York, where there are 79,000 homeless, of whom just 3,700 are unsheltered.
    (6) The second myth is that rising homelessness in cities is the result of migration, either in search of better weather or benefits. Homelessness is a home-grown problem. About 70％ of the homeless in San Francisco previously lived in the city; 75％ of those living on the streets of Los Angeles, in places like Skid Row, come from the surrounding area. In Hawaii, a majority of the homeless are ethnic Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, suggesting that the problem is largely local.
    (7) The third myth is that nothing can be done about it. Much of this results from combining temporary, sheltered homelessness—the majority of cases—with chronic street homelessness. Most bouts (发作) are short and sheltered, driven chiefly by an inability to pay rent and likely to stabilise after rapid rehousing and time-limited housing vouchers. For the most challenging cases of homelessness, addiction and mental illness, more exhaustive interventions are needed.
    (8) One promising approach is the "housing first" model, which seeks to place people in supportive housing without preconditions, and to provide social services afterwards. Although America pioneered this approach, it has not been scaled up. Instead, the Finns have adopted it and nearly halved their homelessness rates in the past decade. A study of Denver’s programme suggests that permanent supportive housing, though costly, ultimately saves public dollars because it avoids the huge costs of policing, hospitalisation and providing emergency shelter for the homeless.
    (9) All this obscures the chief reason, however, which is the cost of housing. An analysis by Chris Glynn and Emily Fox, two statisticians, predicts that a 10％ increase in rents in a high-cost city like New York would result in an 8％) increase in the number of homeless residents. High housing costs almost surely lurk. Fixing this means dealing with a lack of supply, created by over-burdensome zoning regulations and an unwillingness among Democratic leaders to overcome local interests.
    (10) Unaffordable rental markets make homelessness harder to fix, because housing vouchers go only so far. If the engine driving homelessness is left running, the problem in high-cost cities only gets worse. "We effectively remove 133 people from the streets each day, only to be met by an inflow of 150 people each day," says Mark Ridley-Thomas, of the Board of Supervisors for Los Angeles County.
    (11) The ideal way to get stable housing is a stable job. Chrysalis, the charity that runs The Bin, also maintains an entirely voluntary job-skills-and-placement programme, which they say helped put 2,100 people to work last year. One of them is Marshall May, who was recently promoted at The Bin after years of prison and homelessness. With the bigger pay cheque comes greater financial stability, but also a new source of angst. The rent, he says, is worryingly high.
In Para. 1, the phrase "Skid Row" means________according to the context.
选项 A、a small county in Los Angeles
B、a very poor and untidy area
C、a very flourishing arts district
D、a big place for dumping rubbish
答案B
解析 细节题。第1段第1句介绍“垃圾筒”数量之多，而第3句指出这些是容器，用来装流浪汉(家庭) 的财物 (Each holds the possessions of a homeless person or family)。接着第4句指出这些容器旨在帮助“住在Skid Row街上的人”，也即第3句说的流浪汉。“垃圾筒”设有1,500个，可见流浪汉数量之多，而流浪汉密集的地方应该是城市的贫民窟。第2段第2句更是指出有4，800个流浪汉住在Skid Row。综上，选B项。第2段第3句用Skid Row和pier of Santa Monica和Venice Beach并列，暗示这不是行政划分上的“县”，排除A项。第2段第1句说Skid Row毗邻arts district，故排除C项。D项利用文中的rubbish作干扰，文中rubbish bin是用来给流浪汉存放个人物品的，并非真的垃圾箱，也无从得知“倒垃圾”的地点，故排除D项。
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