翻译考试历年中级口译真题(18)_第7页

Questions 22～26 
      In the immediate post-war years,the city of  Birmingham scheduled some 50,00  small working class cottages as slums due for demolition. Today that process is nearly complete. Yet  it  is clear that, quite apart from any question of  race, an  environmental  problem  remains. The expectation built into the planning policies of 1945 was that  in the  foreseeable future the city would be a better place to live in. But now that slum clearance has run its course, there seems to be universal agreement that the total environment where the slums once stood is more depressing than ever.

      For the past ten years the slum clearance areas have looked like bomb sites. The buildings and places which survive do so on islands in a sea of rubble and ash. When the slums were there they supported an organic community life and each building, each activity, fitted in as part of the whole. But now that they have been destroyed, nothing meaningful appears to remain, or rather those activities which do go on do not seem to have any meaningful relation to the place. They happen there because it is an empty stage which no-one is using any more.

      Typical of the inner-city in this sense is the Birmingham City Football Ground. Standing in un-splendid isolation on what is now wasteland on the edge of Small Heath, it brings into the area a stage army on twenty of so Saturdays a year who come and cheer and then go away again with  little concern  any  more for the  place  where  they have done their  cheering.  Even  they, however, have revolted recently. “The ground” says the leader  of the revolt, “is a  slum”, thus putting his finger on the fact that the demolition of houses creates rather than solves problems of the inner city.           

      A new element has now come upon the scene in the inner-city in the form of the over block. Somehow it doesn't seem to be what Le Corbusier  and the planners who wrote those post war Pelicans  intended.  The public spaces either haven't yet been developed or are more meanly conceived, and the corridors and lifts are places of  horror. In fact these places  were  always suspect. They had no legitimacy in the minds of the public as suburban family housing had, and those who were placed there felt that they had been cheated. Along with the decaying elements, therefore, that which had been conceived as part of the brave new world was part of the problem.

22. The past few decades in Birmingham have proved that slum clearance___________.
    A. takes longer time than expected
    B. creates as many problems as it solves
    C. often raises racial issues
    D. has achieved its aims
23. According to the passage, now that the slum dwellings have gone_________,
    A. no one does anythings at all in those areas
    B. urban theatrical life has gone, too
    C. rebuilding can start almost immediately
    D. the area is extremely unattractive
24. According to the author, a number of Birmingham City football fans_________.
    A. express their dissatisfaction about the slum clearance
    B. are as rebellious as any other club's supporters
    C. get necessary release from watching their team play
    D. are concerned about the future of that part of Birmingham
25. What did people think about tower bocks when thy were first built?
    A. Town planners thought they were badly conceived.
    B. The public compared them with rural housing.
    C. The man in the street didn't like them at all.
    D. People thought them an improvement on suburban housing.
26. This passage is most probably taken from__________.
    A. an official local planning report
    B. a novel set in Birmingham
    C. a history of the Industrial Revolution
    D. a sociology textbook