单选题 In the immediate post-war years, the city of Birmingham scheduled some 50,000 small working class cottage as slums due for demolition. Today that process is nearly complete. Yet it is clear that, quite apart from any question of race, an environmental problem remains. The expectation built into the planning policies of 1945 was that in the foreseeable future the city would be a better place to live in. But now that slum clearance has run its course, there seems to be universal agreement that the total environment where the slums once stood is more depressing than ever. For the past ten years the slum clearance areas have looked like bomb sites. The buildings and places survived on islands in a sea of rubble and ash. When the slums were there they supported an organic community life and each building, each activity, fitted in as part of the whole. But now that they have been destroyed, nothing meaningful appears to remain, or rather those activities which do go on do not seem to have any meaningful relation to the place. They happen there because it is an empty stage which no one is using any more. Typical of the inner-city in this sense is the Birmingham City Football Ground. Standing in unsplendid isolation on what is now wasteland on the edge of Small Heath, it brings into the area a stage army on twenty or so Saturdays a year who come and cheer and then go away again with little concern any more for the place where they have done their cheering. Even they, however, have revolted recently. "The ground," says the leader of the revolt, "is a slum", thus putting his finger on the fact that the demolition of houses creats rather than solves problems of the inner-city. A new element has now come upon the scene in the inner-city in the form of the tower block. Somehow it doesn''t seem to be what Le Corbusier and the planners who wrote those post-war Pelicans intended. The public spaces either haven''t yet been developed or are more meanly conceived, and the corridors and lifts are places of horror. In fact these places were always suspected. They had no legitimacy in the minds of the public as suburban family housing had, and those who were placed there felt that they had been cheated. Along with the decaying elements, therefore, that which had been conceived as part of the brave new world was part of the problem.
单选题 The past few decades in Birmingham have proved that slum clearance________.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】这要从第一段整体来看。这一段主要是说虽然几乎解决了需要解决的住房问题,但是严重的环境问题随之而来。只有B项最符合这个中心意思,其他几个选项都有偏差。
单选题 According to the passage, now that the slum dwellings have gone, ________.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】文中第二段中的nothing meaningful以及no one is using,均可说明其unattractiveness。
单选题 According to the author, a number of Birmingham City football fans________.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】第三段中说到球迷们go away again with little concern any more for theplace where they have done their cheering,而且也对这个slum表示revolt,引申出来的意思也就是他们不太愿意继续支持。
单选题 What did people think about tower blocks when they were first built?
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】文中的最后一段主要是讲述了公众和居民对tower block的不满和失望。
单选题 From the style in which it''s written, this passage was almost certainly taken from________.
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】从全文的风格来看,这个地区的历史、建筑和人们的心态,主要是说明当地的建筑规划与社会问题的关系,而并非关注历史本身;更不是客观的城市规划报告;由于缺乏相应的人物和事件,也不大可能是小说。