Passage Two
Questions 26 to 30 are based on the following passage.
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 yearsand 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 millioo pounds of manureand 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.
【大学英语六级真题阅读理解的强化练习三】相关文章:
最新
2016-10-18
2016-10-11
2016-10-11
2016-10-08
2016-09-30
2016-09-30