新SAT官方指南阅读第十七篇全解析
This passage is adapted from Alan Ehrenhalt,The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City.©2013 by Vintage.Ehrenhalt is an urbanologist—a scholar of cities and their development.Demographic inversion is a phenomenon that describes the rearrangement of living patterns throughout a metropolitan area.
We are not witnessing the abandonment of the suburbs,or a movement of millions of people back to the city all at once.The2010census certainly did not turn up evidence of a middle-class stampede to the nation’s cities.The news was mixed:Some of the larger cities on the East Coast tended to gain population,albeit in small increments.Tho in the Midwest,including Chicago, tended to lo substantial numbers.The cities that showed gains in overall population during the 5
entire decade tended to be in the South and Southwest.But when it comes to measuring
demographic inversion,raw census numbers are an ineffective blunt instrument.A clor look at the results shows that the most powerful demographic events of the past decade were the
movement of African Americans out of central cities(180,000of them in Chicago alone)and the ttlement of immigrant groups in suburbs,often ones many miles distant from downtown.
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Central-city areas that gained affluent residents in the first part of the decade maintained that
population in the recession years from2007to2009.They also,according to a2011study by
Brookings,suffered considerably less from incread unemployment than the suburbs did.Not many young professionals moved to new downtown condos in the recession years becau few 15
such residences were being built.But there is no reason to believe that the demographic trends
prevailing prior to the construction bust will not resume once that bust is over.It is important to remember that demographic inversion is not a proxy for population growth;it can occur in cities that are growing,tho who numbers are flat,and even in tho undergoing a modest decline in size.
America’s major cities face enormous fiscal problems,many of them the result of public
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pension obligations they incurred in the more prosperous years of the past two decades.Some,
Chicago prominent among them,simply are not producing enough revenue to support the level of public rvices to which most of the citizens have grown to feel entitled.How the cities are going to solve this problem,I do not know.What I do know is that if fiscal crisis were going to drive
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affluent professionals out of central cities,it would have done so by now.There is no evidence
that it has.
The truth is that we are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the cond half of the twentieth century is coming to an end.And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities,suburbs,and urban mobility as a result.
Much of our perspective on the process of metropolitan ttlement dates,whether we realize 30
it or not,from a paper written in1925by the University of Chicago sociologist Ernest W.Burgess.
It was Burgess who defined four urban/suburban zones of ttlement:a central business district;an area of manufacturing just beyond it;then a residential area inhabited by the industrial and
一台电脑赚钱的门路
immigrant working class;and finally an outer enclave of single-family dwellings.Burgess was
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right about the urban America of1925;he was right about the urban America of1974.Virtually every city in the country had a downtown,where the commercial life of the metropolis was
conducted;it had a factory district just beyond;it had districts of working-class residences just
beyond that;and it had residential suburbs for the wealthy and the upper middle class at the far end of the continuum.As a family moved up the economic ladder,it also moved outward from
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crowded working-class districts to more spacious apartments and,eventually,to a suburban home.
The suburbs of Burgess’s time bore little remblance to tho at the end of the twentieth century, but the theory still esntially worked.People moved ahead in life by moving farther out.
《三只小猪》But in the past decade,in quite a few places,this model has cead to describe reality.There are still
送花贺卡内容
downtown commercial districts,but there are no factory districts lying next to them.There are scarcely any factories at all.The clo-in parts of the city,who few residents Burgess
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described as dwelling in“submerged regions of poverty,degradation and dia,”are
increasingly the prerve of the affluent who work in the commercial core.And just as crucially newcomers to America are not ttling on the inside and accumulating the resources to move out;
they are living in the suburbs from day one.
11、Which choice best summarizes the first paragraph of the passage(lines1-19)?
A)The2010census demonstrated a sizeable growth in the number of middle-class families moving into inner cities.
B)The2010census is not a reliable instrument for measuring population trends in American cities.
C)Population growth and demographic inversion are distinct phenomena,and demographic inversion is evident in many American cities.
D)Population growth in American cities has been increasing since roughly2000,while suburban populations have decread.
正确答案:C
分析:文章第一个段落重点讲述:人口反演不同于人口增长。作者还特意提到:人口反演在很多美国城市都在发生,既发生在人口增长的地方,人口不变的地方,也发生在人口衰减的地方。
休闲衣服12、According to the passage,members of which group moved away from central-city areas in large numbers in the early2000s?
A)The unemployed
B)Immigrants
C)Young professionals
D)African Americans
正确答案:D
分析:文章14-17行提到:在过去10年最大的人口事件是非裔美国人搬离中心城市。
13、In line18,“flat”is clost in meaning to
A)static.
龙环葡韵B)deflated.
C)featureless.
D)obscure.
正确答案:A
分析:作者提到:人口反演发生在人口增长、人口不变甚至是人口衰退的城市里(occur in cities that are growing,tho who numbers are flat,and even in tho undergoing a modest decline in size.)A选项static指静态的、不变的人口。
14、According to the passage,which choice best describes the current financial situation in many major American cities?
司马牛之叹
A)Expected tax increas due to demand for public works
物业客服工作总结B)Economic hardship due to promis made in past years
C)Greater overall prosperity due to an incread inner-city tax ba
D)Insufficient revenues due to a decrea in manufacturing
正确答案:B
分析:作者提到:美国很多城市正在经历经济困难或者财政危机,主要原因是过去二十年所人口繁荣所带来的抚恤金问题。
15、Which choice provides the best evidence for the answer to the previous question?
花亚麻A)Lines20-21(“America’s...decades”)
B)Lines23-24(“ know”)
C)Lines24-25(“w”)
D)Lines27-28(“d”)
正确答案:A
分析:见14题解释。
16、The passage implies that American cities in1974
A)were witnessing the flight of minority populations to the suburbs.
B)had begun to lo their manufacturing ctors.
C)had a traditional four-zone structure.