2. 职称英语
  3. Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Quee

Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Quee

游客2023-12-14  17
问题     Every morning at four-thirty, sixty concrete trucks—from Brooklyn, from Queens, from New Jersey— race in the dark over bridges and through tunnels and converge at the intersection of West and Verse Streets, where One World Trade Center is going up. Concrete is perishable, A load will spoil in ninety minutes once it has left the hatching plant. The trucks pull up to the construction site. They dump their loads into big baskets with hydraulic pumping systems. Eleven thousand three hundred tons of superstructure steel are waiting. The other day, Chris Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority, which is supervising the project, stood three hundred feet in the air, on what will be the twentieth of One World Trade Center’s hundred and four floors, and said, "This site will be understood by the public on how well this tower rises, but the real metric is how quickly the concrete gets poured. " Toward the building’s core, where office workers will one day ride elevators, members of Local 46 of the Metallic Lathers and Reinforcing Ironworkers union were torch-cutting rebar. Sparks flew. Below, tiny fluorescent-vested figures trundled dollies and hoisted planks in what looked like a scene from "Fraggle Rock. "
    Ward, who is fifty-five, took the Port Authority job in May of 2008. He inherited a huge, politically impossible mess: nineteen public agencies,  two developers,  a hundred and one contractors,  and thirty-three architects have stakes in the World Trade Center redevelopment project. Ward’s first act was to order a reevaluation of the plans for the site. Thanks to him, a memorial will be completed in time for the tenth anniversary of September 11th—sooner than it might have been, but, for a lot of people, not soon enough. Ward wears a blue suit and speaks like a technocrat, but his handshake is a crusher and he knows his girders. He didn’t like the name Freedom Tower—as One World Trade Center was originally called—any more than anyone else did. He said, "That sense that New York needs a new downtown, that we need to defeat the terrorists—was it inevitable, that language? I don’t know, but I can understand why it happened. "
    He is concerned that large-scale, sentimental thinking—"monumentalism," he calls it—has paralyzed the rebuilding process. "The political rhetoric, the sense that New York had to do everything huge at one time, obscured the construction reality," he said. He pointed out some steel bundles, dangling from a crane,  and explained how the speeded-up schedule for the memorial affected the sequencing of PATH service, which affected the building of the "1 box"—the pod that encases the tracks of the No. 1 train, which runs directly through the site—which, in turn, affected the building of Larry Silverstein’s Three World Trade Center. To Ward,  the site is a delicate,  mutating mesh of counterweighted considerations—a high-stakes game of pickup sticks.
    New York is not Dubai. "People always say, ’How come One World Trade Center is taking so long? The Empire State Building was built in fifteen months,’ " Ward said. "Yeah, well, people forget that five people died building the Empire State Building. " He noted that, while Dubai "can literally rip up and relocate an entire town," plans for a floating swimming-pool barge in city waters were delayed for years because of red tape. Walking, on ground level, through dirt and nails—but little garbage—he spotted the looming jackknife of the new Goldman Sachs tower, at 200 West Street. "People say, ’This Goldman Sachs building got built in four years. Why is One World Trade Center taking so long? ’ Well, one reason is that this is getting built on top of a PATH train, and Goldman Sachs got built on top of a fucking parking lot !"
    The memorial is starting to come together. Standing on a concrete platform facing north, you can envision water gushing from spigots, which have been provisionally duct-taped in place, and rushing down thirty-foot granite walls into a pair of reflecting pools. The other day, workers were affixing slabs of granite to the wails.
    In mid-May, construction on One World Trade Center reached the twentieth floor, or what is called the "typical office floor"—the point beyond which the rest of the stories are easily replicated—and the hope is that, from now on, the building will rise about a floor every ten days.
    "It’s thrilling when you see it, but it’s nerve-racking," Ward said. "The margin for error in this town is tough. " [br] According to Ward, the name Freedom Tower may
选项 A、remind Americans of the 9. 11 incident,
B、aggravate the hostility of the terrorists.
C、be changed by a political activist,
D、lead to another serious incident.
答案 B
解析 由题干中的Freedom Tower定位至第二段倒数第二句，末句指出他不喜欢这个名字的原因“That sense that New York needs a new downtown，that we need to defeat the terrorists—was it inevitable，that language? I don’t know，but 1 can understand why it happened．”，由此可以推断，他认为这个名字会激化矛盾，使得恐怖分子做出了9. 11那样的极端事件，故[B]为答案。文中没有提到名字对普通人的影响，排除[A]；也没有提及有可能更改名字，[C]无依据；句中提到的是why it happened，指过去的911事件，没有暗示有可能发生其他的类似事件，排除[D]。
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