单选题Directions: In this part there are four
passages, each with four suggested answers. Choose the one that you think is the
best answer. Mark your Answer Sheet by drawing with a pencil a short bar across
the corresponding letter in the brackets. When I was
still an architecture student, a teacher told me, "We learn more from buildings
that fall down than from buildings that stand up. " What he meant was that
construction is as much the result of experience as of theory. Although
structural design follows established formulas, the actual performance of a
building is complicated by the passage of time, the behavior of users, the
natural elements—and unnatural events. All are difficult to simulate. Buildings,
unlike cars, can't be crash—tasted. The first important lesson
of the World Trade Center collapse is that tall buildings can withstand the
impact of a large jetliner. The twin towers were supported by 59 perimeter
columns on each side. Although about 30 of these columns, extending from four to
six floors, were destroyed in each building by the impact, initially both towers
remained standing. Even so, the death toll (代价) was appalling—2,235 people lost
their lives. I was once asked, how tall buildings should be
designed given what we'd learned from the World Trade Center collapse. My answer
was, "Lower". The question of when a tall building becomes unsafe is easy to
answer. Common aerial fire-fighting ladders in use today are 100 feet high and
can reach to about the 10th floor, so fires in buildings up to 10 stories high
can be fought from the exterior (外部). Fighting fires and evacuating occupants
above that height depend on fire stairs. The taller the building, the longer it
will take for firefighters to climb to the scene of the fire. So the simple
answer to the safety question is "Lower than 10 stories". Then
why don't cities impose lower height limits? A 60-story office building does not
have six times as much rentable space as a 10-story building. However, all
things being equal, such a building will produce four times more revenue and
four times more in property taxes. So cutting building heights would mean
cutting city budgets. The most important lesson of the World
Trade Centex collapse is not that we should stop building tall buildings but
that we have misjudged their cost. We did the same thing when we underesti-mated
the cost of hurtling along a highway in a steel box at 70 miles per hour. It
took many years before seat belts, air bags, radial tires, and antilock brakes
became commonplace. At first, cars simply were too slow to warrant concern.
Later, manufacturers resisted these expensive devices, arguing that consumers
would not pay for safety. Now we do—willingly.
单选题
The first paragraph tells us that ______.
A. architecture is something more out of experience than out of theory
B. architecture depends just as much on experience as on theory
C. it is safer for people to live in old buildings
D. we learn not so much from our failures as from our success