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.Those in the Midwest,including Chicago, tended to lose substantial numbers.The cities that showed gains in overall population during the 5演员王新军
entire decade tended to be in the South and Southwest.But when it comes to measuring
i hopedemographic inversion,raw census numbers are an ineffective blunt instrument.A closer 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 settlement of immigrant groups in suburbs,often ones many miles distant from downtown.
10
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 increased unemployment than the suburbs did.Not many young professionals moved to new downtown condos in the recession years because 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,those whose numbers are flat,and even in those undergoing a modest decline in size.
America’s major cities face enormous fiscal problems,many of them the result of public
20
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 services 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
25
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 second 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 settlement 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 settlement:a central business district;an area of manufacturing just beyond it;then a residential area inhabited by the industrial and
immigrant working class;and finally an outer enclave of single-family dwellings.Burgess was
35
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
40
crowded working-class districts to more spacious apartments and,eventually,to a suburban home.
The suburbs of Burgess’s time bore little resemblance to those at the end of the twentieth century, but the theory still essentially worked.People moved ahead in life by moving farther out.
But in the past decade,in quite a few places,this model has ceased to describe reality.There are still
downtown commercial districts,but there are no factory districts lying next to them.There are scarcely any factories at all.These close-in parts of the city,whose few residents Burgess
45
described as dwelling in“submerged regions of poverty,degradation and disease,”are
increasingly the preserve of the affluent who work in the commercial core.And just as crucially newcomers to America are not settling on the inside and accumulating the resources to move out;
叶子红了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.
郭可盈个人资料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 decreased.
正确答案：C
12、According to the passage,members of which group moved away from central-city areas in large numbers in the early2000s?人妖rose资料
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 closest in meaning to
A)static.
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,those whose numbers are flat,and even in those 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?
A)Expected tax increases due to demand for public works
B)Economic hardship due to promises made in past years
C)Greater overall prosperity due to an increased inner-city tax base
D)Insufficient revenues due to a decrease 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?
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。
一生挚爱16、The passage implies that American cities in1974
A)were witnessing the flight of minority populations to the suburbs.
B)had begun to lose their manufacturing sectors.
C)had a traditional four-zone structure.
发布评论