首页
登录
职称英语
What is a Port City? The port city provides a fascinatin
What is a Port City? The port city provides a fascinatin
游客
2024-02-29
7
管理
问题
What is a Port City?
The port city provides a fascinating and rich understanding of the movement of people and goods around the world. We understand a port as a centre of land-sea exchange, and so a major source of livelihood and a major force for cultural mixing. But do ports all produce a range of common urban characteristics which justify classifying port cities together under a single generic label? Do they have enough in common to warrant distinguishing them from other kinds of cities?
A port must be distinguished from a harbor. They are two very different things. Most ports have poor harbors, and many fine harbors see few ships. Harbor is a physical concept, a shelter for ships; port is an economic concept, a centre of land-sea exchange which requires good access to a hinterland even more than a sealinked foreland, it is landward access, which is productive of goods for export and which demands imports, that is critical. Poor harbors can be improved with breakwaters and dredging if there is a demand for a port. Madras and Colombo are examples of harbors expensively improved by enlarging, dredging and building breakwaters.
Port cities become industrial, financial and service centers and political capitals because of their water connections and the urban concentration which arises there and later draws to it railways, highways and air routes. Water transport means cheap access, the chief basis of all port cities. Many of the world’s biggest cities, for example, London, New York, Shanghai, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Jakarta, Calcutta, Philadelphia and San Francisco began as ports-that is, with land-sea exchange as their major function, but they have since grown disproportionately in other respects so that their port functions are no longer dominant. They remain different kinds of places from non-port cities and their port functions account for that difference.
Port functions, more than anything else, make a city cosmopolitan. A port city is open to the world. In its races, cultures, and ideas, as well as goods from a variety of places, jostle, mix and enrich each other and the lire of the city.
The smell of the sea and the harbor, the sound of boat whistles or the moving tides are symbols of their multiple links with a wide world, samples of which are present in microcosm within their own urban areas.
Sea ports have been transformed by the advent of powered vessels, whose size and draught have increased. Many formerly important ports have become economically and physically less accessible as a result. By-passed by most of their former enriching flow of exchange, they have become cultural and economic backwaters or have acquired the character of museums of the past. Examples of these are Charleston, Salem, Bristol, Plymouth, Surat, Gallo, Melaka, Suzhou chow, and a long list of earlier prominent port cities in Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Much domestic port trade has not been recorded. What evidence we have suggested that domestic trade was greater at all periods than external trade. Shanghai, for example, did most of its trade with other Chinese ports and inland cities. Calcutta traded mainly with other parts of India and so on. Most of any city’s population is engaged in providing goods and services for the city itself. Trade outside the city is its basic function. But each basic worker requires food housing, clothing and other such services. Estimates of the ratio of basic to service workers range from 1: 4 to 1: 8.
No city can be simply a port but must be involved in a variety of other activities. The port function of the city draws to it raw materials and distributes them in many other forms. Ports take advantage of the need for breaking up the bulk material where water and land transport meet and where loading and unloading costs can be minimized by refining raw materials or turning them into finished goods. The major examples here are oil refining and ore refining, which are commonly located at ports. It is not easy to draw a line around what is and is not a port function. All ports handle, unload, sort, alter, process, repack, and reship most of what they receive. A city may still be regarded as a port city when it becomes involved in a great range of functions not immediately involved with ships or docks.
Cities which began as ports retain the chief commercial and administrative centre of the city close to the waterfront. The centre of New York is in lower Manhattan between two river mouths, the City of London is on the Thames, Shanghai is along the Bund. This proximity to water is also true of Boston, Philadelphia, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and Yokohama, where the commercial, financial, and administrative centers are still grouped around their harbors even though each city has expanded into a metropolis. Even a casual visitor cannot mistake them as anything but port cities. [br] In the past, many cities did more trade within their own country than with overseas ports.
选项
A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案
A
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3493122.html
相关试题推荐
【B1】[br]【B4】A、providesB、chargesC、offersD、equipsAprovide...withsth为……提供某物
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafasc
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafasc
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafasc
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafasc
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafascinatin
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafascinatin
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafascinatin
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafascinatin
WhatisaPortCity?Theportcityprovidesafascinatin
随机试题
[originaltext]About200yearsago,theUnitedStateseconomywasgrowingqui
孕激素的生理作用A.助孕 B.促进排卵 C.安胎 D.促进乳房腺泡发育
共用题干 张某委托甲房地产经纪机构(以下简称甲机构)购买一套住房。张某对拟购住
一片高2m,宽3m,厚370mm的墙,如图所示。采用普通烧结砖和M2.5砂浆砌筑
某商场就建筑面积为20000㎡,地上营业厅设有吊顶,安装湿式自动喷水灭火系统,地
癃闭膀胱湿热证的预防最主要的是A.预防感冒 B.保持心情舒畅 C.避免过食肥
(2020年真题)某中国进出口公司为了防范汇率风险,与某银行做如下掉期交易:
基础心理学是研究()。 (A)正常成人心理现象的心理学基础学科 (B
特殊认知能力的测试内容不包括()。A.演绎能力 B.语言理解力 C.数字
注册商标有效期自核准之日起计算为10年,有效期满需要继续使用的,应当在期满前()
最新回复
(
0
)