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2002
年真题听力原文、答案及详解
听力原文
SECTION A TALK
The first era in American urban history extended from the early 17th century to about 1840. Throughout those years the total urban population remained small and so did cities. At the first feder
al census in 1790. city dwellers made up nearly 5.
1%
of the total population and only I wo places had more than 25 ,000 inhabitants. Fifty years later only 10.
8%
of the nation's population fell into the urban category and only one city, New York, contained more than 250,000 people.
Largely be
cause of the unsophisticated modes of transportation, even the more populous places in the early 19th century remai
ne
d small enou
gh that
people could easil
y
work fro
m
om
end
of the vi
t
y lo l
he
other i
n
those days. ( QI )
Though small by m<xlem standards these **walking cities" , as it were, performed u variety of functions in those days. One was economic.
Throughout the pre
・
modern era,
【
his port cf lhe urban life remained so overwhelmingly commercial thal almosl every city owed it
s
develepmenl lo
t
rade.
(Q2)
Yet city dwellers concerned themselves not only w
ith
promoting agricuhural activities in their rural areas, they also collected and processed goods from thege areas and then distrib
ut
ed them to oth
er cities. (Q3)
From the beginning then and increasingly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, cities served as centers of both commerce and simple manufacturing.
Apart from the economic functions, the early cities also had important non-economic functions to play. Since libraries, museums, schools and colleges were built and needed people to go there to vis
it or to study, cities and the large early towns with their concentraGon of population tended Io serve as centers of educational activities and as places from which information was spread to the countryside. In addition, the towns with people of different occupational, ethnic, racial and religious Gliations be
came focuses of formal and informal organizations which were set up to foster the security and to pro
mote the interests and influence of each group. In those days the pre-industrial city in America func
tioned as a complex and varied organizing element in American life, not as a simple, homogeneous and static unit.
The vitality of these early cities was reinforced by the nature of their location and by the process of town spreading. Throughout the pre-industrial period of American history, the cities occupied sites on the eastern portion of the then largely under-developed continent, and the settlement on the coun
tryside generally followed the expansion of towns in that region. The various interest groups in each city tended to compete with lheir counterparts in other cities (or economic, social and politicul control first of nearby and later of more distant and larger areas. And always there remained the underdevel
oped regions to be developed through the establishment of new towns by individuals and groups. T
hese individuals &nd groups soughl economic opportunitie
s or
looked for a better social
, polit
ical or
relig
ious atmosphere. (Q4
)
【
n this sense, the cities spearheaded the development and succession of -178-
勰關
m
population lived in cities.
勰關
m
population lived in cities.
urban frontiers. While this kind of circumstance made Amer conscious city-building peoples of their time, it did not resu sense that decade by decade an ever larger proportion of the
In 1690, an estimated 9 to 10 percent of American colonists lived in urban settlements.
A
cen
tury later, that is, the end of the 18th century, though 24 places had 2,500 persons or more, city dwellers accounted for only 5.
1%
of the total population. For the next thirty years, the proportion re
mained relatively stable and it was not until 1830 that the urban figure moved back up to the level of 1690.
In short, as the number of cities increased after 1690,
they sent larger numbers of people into the countrysi
2002答案解析.docx
