题目内容：
阅读下面材料，回答题：Triumph of the City
A. 243 million Americans crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban.36 million people live in and around Tokyo, the most productive metropolitan area in the world. Twelve million people reside in central Mumbai. On a planet with vast amounts of space, all of humanity could fit in Texas-each of us with a personal townhouse, we choose cities. Although it has become cheaper to travel long distances, or to telecommute, more and more people are clustering closer and closer together in large metropolitan areas. Five million more people very month live in the cities of the developing world, and in 2011, more than half the world's population is urban.
B. Cities, the dense agglomerations (凝聚体) that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and So rates argued in an Athenian marketplace. The streets of Florence gave us the Renaissance., and the streets of Birmingham gave us the Industrial Revolution. The great prosperity of contemporary London and Tokyo comes from their ability to produce new thinking. Wandering these cities--whether down stone sidewalks or grid-cutting cross streets, around roundabouts or under freeways--is to study nothing less than human progress.
C. In the richer countries of the West, cities have survived the end of the industrial age and are now wealthier, healthier, and more tempting than ever. In the world's poorer places, cities are expanding enormously because urban density provides the clearest path from poverty to prosperity. Despite the technological breakthroughs that have caused the death of distance, it turns out that the world isn't flat; it's paved.
D. The city has triumphed. But as many of us know from personal experience, sometimes city roads are paved to hell. The city may win, but too often its citizens seem to lose. Every urban childhood is shaped by extraordinary people and experiences-some delicious, like the sense of power that comes from a preteen's first subway trip alone; some less so, like a first exposure to urban gunfire. For every Fifth Avenue, there's a Mumbai slum; for every Sorbonne, there's a D.C. high school guarded by metal detectors.
E. Indeed, for many Americans, the latter half of the twentieth century--the end of the industrial age--was an education not in urban splendor (辉煌) but in urbah. squalor (惨状). How well we learn from the lessons our cities teach us will determine whether our urban species will flourish in what can be a new golden age of the city.
F. My passion for the urban world was inspired by my metropolitan childhood; I've spent my life trying to understand cities. That quest has been rooted in economic theory and data, but it has also meandered (漫步) through the histories of metropolitan areas and the everyday stories of those who live and work in them. I find studying cities so interesting because they pose fascinating, important, and often troubling questions. Why do the richest and poorest people in the world so often live side by side? How do once-mighty cities fall into disrepair? Why do so
many artistic movements arise so quickly in particular cities at particular moments? Why do so many smart people enact so many foolish urban policies?
G. There's no better place to ponder these questions than what many consider to be the prototypical cit New York. Native New Yorkers, like myself, may occasionally have a slightly exaggerated view of their city's importance, but New York is still a model of urbanity and therefore an appropriate place to start our journey to cities across the world. Its story includes the past, present, and future of our urban centers,, and provides a springboard for many of the themes that will emerge from the pages and places ahead.
H. If you stand on Forty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue this Wednesday afternoon, you'll be surrounded by people. Some are rushing uptown for a meting or downtown to grab a drink. Others are walking east to enter the Grand Central Terminal, which has more platforms than any other train station in the world. Some people may be trying to buy an engagement ring--after all, Forty-seventh Street is the nation's premier market for jewels. There will be visitors gazing upward--something New Yorkers fiever do on their way from one landmark to another. If you imitate a tourist and look up, you'll see two great ridges of skyscrapers framing the valley that is Fifth Avenue.
I. Thirty years ago, New York City's future looked far less bright. Like almost every colder, older city. The city's subways and buses felt out of date in a world being rebuilt around the car. The city's port, once the glory of the Eastern seaboard, had sunk into irrelevance. Under the leadership of John Lindsay and Abe Beame, the city's government had come near default despite having some of the highest taxes in the nation. Not just Jerry Ford, but history itself seemed to be telling New York City to drop dead.
J. New York, "or more properly New Amsterdam, was founded during an earlier era of globalization as a distant outpost of the Dutch West India Company. It was a trading village where a hodgepodge (大杂烩) of adventurers came to make fortunes swapping pearls for furs. Those Dutch settlers clustered together because proximity made it
easier to exchange goods and ideas and because there was safety behind the town's protective wall (now Wall Street).
K. In the eighteenth century, New York passed Boston to become the English colonies' most important port; it specialized in shipping wheat and flour south to feed the sugar and tobacco colonies. During the first half of the nineteenth century, with business booming, New York's population grew from sixty thousand to eight hundred
thousand, and the city became America's urban giants. That population explosion was partly due to changes in transportation technology. At the start of the nineteenth century, ships were generally small--three hundred tons was a normal size--and, like smaller airplanes today, ideal for point-to-point trips, like Liverpool to Charlestown or Boston to Glasgow. Between 1800 and 1850, improvements in technology and finance brought forth larger ships that could carry bigger loads at faster speeds and lower cost.
L. There was no percentage in having these huge ships traveling to every point along the American coast. Just like today's Boeing 747s, which land at major centers and transfer their passengers onto smaller planes that take them to their final destinations, the big ships came to one central bay and then transferred their goods to smaller vessels for delivery up and down the Eastern seaboard. New York was America's super port, with its central location, deep, protected harbor, and river access far into the inland. When America moved to a hub-and-spoke shipping system, New York became the natural hub.
Cheaper long-distance travel and telecommunication did not lead people to move away from the cities.
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