Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon and the planting there of a wrinkled flag can rival the construction of Panama Canal as an epoch-making accomplishment. The Suez Canal, the trans-Siberian Railroad and the Taj Mahal all pale beside it. The canal's construction is more closely akin to the pyramids of Egypt in its scope and difficulty of execution, but in the modern era, there is only the moon.
Like the landing on the moon, the construction of a canal across the narrow Isthmus of Panama was a dream long before it became reality. As early as 1534, Charles I of Spain proposed a canal at Panama, but it would take nearly 400 years for builders to catch up with his imagination.
When the canal finally was proposed required all the creativity the twentieth century could muster. It was the largest public work ever attempted. Its engineers had to control a wild river, cut the continental divide, construct the largest dam and man made lake known to that date and swing the largest locks ever constructed from the biggest cement structures then poured. Along the way, two of the world's most devastating diseases had to be wiped out in one of their greatest strongholds. And all of this was to be done without the airplane or the automobile: Kitty Hawk rose into the head-lines in 1903 the same year the U. S. signed a treaty with Panama——and there was no road across the isthmus until the World War Ⅱ.
If Panama has had an unusual role in bygone dreams, it most certainly has a startling relationship to the hard facts of geography. The country is farther east than most people imagine——the canal and about half of Panama actually lie east of Miami. Because of the country's shallow "S" shape and east-west orientation, it has places where the sun rises in the Pacific and sets in the Atlantic. More significantly, Panama is squeezed into the narrowest portion of Central. At the canal, just 43 miles of land separate Atlantic and Pacific shores. Perhaps even more important, Panama offers the lowest point in the North American continental divide—— originally 312 feet above sea level at the canal's Culebra Cut. By comparison, the lowest pass in the United States is nearly 5,000 feet.
In scope and difficulty, the canals construction was most closely alike to that of the ______. ()
A. Suez Canal
B. trans-Siberian Railroad
C. Taj Mahal
D. pyramids of Egypt
M: That's fine. Can you please tell me the departure time again?
Q: What's the man doing now?
(13)
A. Saying goodbye to a friend.
Buying a ticket for a sports event.
C. Paying a bill at the bank.
D. Paying a plane trip.
听力原文:M: Your computer makes such a loud noise. I guess it must be something wrong. You'd better have it checked out.
W: You are right. And I suppose I've put it off long enough.
Q: What will the woman probably do?
(15)
A. She will return it to the store.
B. She will have it checked.
C. She will refer to the book.
D. She will have it replaced.
To the residents of the island, each section is a hometown. Those who live in the West 70s, 80s, and 90s -- the Up- per West Side, though streets run above 200 at the northern tip -- know their neighbourhoods as a cosmopolitan mixture of languages, occupations, and income levels. It is the origin of much of the chaos of the party. On the Upper East Side, east of Central Park, is a different mixture, generally more affluent.
The Chelsea area of the West 2Os, with its tenements, renovated brownstones, and huge cooperatives built by labour unions, has a more sedate pace than the East Village and Soho (derived from "south of Houston Street" ), comprising much of the old Lower East Side and containing the city's major concentration of struggling writers and artists. Greenwich Village, the old centre of bohemian life, has become a favourite dwelling place for affluent professionals and successful authors and artists. Harlem means more than just tenements, housing projects, and black polities. It means a vibrant street life ranging from sports to stoop seminars, and it is spiced with luxury apartment houses with doormen, inhabited almost entirely by blacks. Yorkville, in the East 80s, retains pockets of Czech, Hungarian, and German cultures in a clash of old tenements and towering luxury apartment houses. The neighbourhood taverns of the Irish proliferate through Inwood at the northernmost part of the island, where the borough of Manhattan spills over the Harlem River to encompass an enclave of a few square blacks within mainland Bronx. In Inwood lie manhattan’s few remaining forested acres, and on open recreation areas the Irish keep alive their national sports of hurling and Gaelic football -- much as courts are maintained for bocciball games in Little Italy many miles to the south. On Morningside Heights around Columbia University, the civilities of the academic world overlook the bleak stretches of Harlem below and to the east and north.
Even fantastic Lower Manhattan, from the Battery, with its ferry slips at the island’s tip, to City Halls, has began taking on the atmosphere of a neighbourhood. Apartment houses have gone up in the vicinity of City Hall, and the over- whelming skyscraper jungle around Wall Street, which is home to hundreds of financial and insurance institutions and some of the nation's largest banks, exerts international power.
Which of the following statements about Harlem is TRUE?
A. Most residents living in Harlem are black people.
B. A visitor can find nothing but tenements and housing projects in Harlem.
C. Harlem is the only borough in Manhattan without luxury apartments.
D. Harlem is a favourite dwelling place for writers and artists.