单选题
My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naive and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a Utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet and we didn"t have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to be about a dollar a day. The Utopian community was Manhattan.(Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.)Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it"s a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and it is one of the greenest cites of the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn"t matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That"s ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use. "Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disaster— except that it isn"t, " John Holtzclaw, a transportation consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. " If New Yorkers lived at the typical American sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would require many times as much land. They"d be driving cars, and they"d have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and then he"d be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into streams. " The key to New York"s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan"s population density is more than eight hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in some of the most inherently energy-sufficient residential structures in the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land from the rest of America to sprawl into.
单选题
"Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third. " In this sentence, Second and Third refers to
单选题
"Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously an environmental disaster— except that it isn"t. " In this sentence "it" refers to