OG3社科 公共交通

文章分析：

Blurb: 

Straphanger

para 1: 

Though there are 600 million cars on the planet,

and counting, there are also seven billion people,

which means that for the vast majority of us getting

around involves taking buses, ferryboats, commuter

trains, streetcars, and subways. In other words,

traveling to work, school, or the market means being

a straphanger: somebody who, by choice or necessity,

relies on public transport, rather than a privately

owned automobile.

大多数人还是使用公共交通的；

para 2: 

Half the population of New York, Toronto, and

London do not own cars. Public transport is how

most of the people of Asia and Africa, the world’s

most populous continents, travel. Every day, subway

systems carry 155 million passengers, thirty-four

times the number carried by all the world’s airplanes,

and the global public transport market is now valued

at $428 billion annually. A century and a half after

the invention of the internal combustion engine,

private car ownership is still an anomaly.

私家车还是少的；

para 3: 

And yet public transportation, in many minds, is

the opposite of glamour—a squalid last resort for

those with one too many impaired driving charges,

too poor to afford insurance, or too decrepit to get

behind the wheel of a car. In much of North

America, they are right: taking transit is a depressing

experience. Anybody who has waited far too long on

a street corner for the privilege of boarding a

lurching, overcrowded bus, or wrestled luggage onto

subways and shuttles to get to a big city airport,

knows that transit on this continent tends to be

underfunded, ill-maintained, and ill-planned. Given

the opportunity, who wouldn’t drive? Hopping in a

car almost always gets you to your destination more

quickly.

但是公共交通的不好让人们选择开车；【让步段】

glamour 魅力

squalid /ˈskwɑːlɪd/ 

para 4: 

It doesn’t have to be like this. Done right, public

transport can be faster, more comfortable, and

cheaper than the private automobile. In Shanghai,

German-made magnetic levitation trains skim over

elevated tracks at 266 miles an hour, whisking people

to the airport at a third of the speed of sound. In

provincial French towns, electric-powered streetcars

run silently on rubber tires, sliding through narrow

streets along a single guide rail set into cobblestones.

From Spain to Sweden, Wi-Fi equipped high-speed

trains seamlessly connect with highly ramified metro

networks, allowing commuters to work on laptops as

they prepare for same-day meetings in once distant

capital cities. In Latin America, China, and India,

working people board fast-loading buses that move

like subway trains along dedicated busways, leaving

the sedans and SUVs of the rich mired in

dawn-to-dusk traffic jams. And some cities have

transformed their streets into cycle-path freeways,

making giant strides in public health and safety and

the sheer livability of their neighborhoods—in the

process turning the workaday bicycle into a viable

form of mass transit.

公共交通可以变得更好；

para 5: 

If you credit the demographers, this transit trend

has legs. The “Millenials,” who reached adulthood

around the turn of the century and now outnumber

baby boomers, tend to favor cities over suburbs, and

are far more willing than their parents to ride buses

and subways. Part of the reason is their ease with

iPads, MP3 players, Kindles, and smartphones: you

can get some serious texting done when you’re not

driving, and earbuds offer effective insulation from

all but the most extreme commuting annoyances.

Even though there are more teenagers in the country

than ever, only ten million have a driver’s license

(versus twelve million a generation ago). / Baby

boomers may have been raised in Leave It to Beaver

suburbs, but as they retire, a significant contingent is

favoring older cities and compact towns where they

have the option of walking and riding bikes. Seniors,

too, are more likely to use transit, and by 2025, there

will be 64 million Americans over the age of

sixty-five. Already, dwellings in older neighborhoods

in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Denver, especially

those near light-rail or subway stations, are

commanding enormous price premiums over

suburban homes. The experience of European and

Asian cities shows that if you make buses, subways,

and trains convenient, comfortable, fast, and safe, a

surprisingly large percentage of citizens will opt to

ride rather than drive.

Leave It to Beaver

a US television programme that was popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, about a boy called Beaver Cleaver and his family, who lived in a typical suburban area

人口统计学家发现年轻人、老年人都更加愿意选择公共交通。

题型解析：

11 结构题之段落功能题

就是选让步段的作用

12 直接细节，紧踩原文

13 上一题定位

14 主旨题之段落大意

15 上题定位

16 单词意思

17 单词意思

18 独立循证

19 图表题 干扰是D，数据无法体现频率。

20 图表题

作者简介：

Taras Grescoe

Taras Grescoe was born in 1967. He writes essays, articles, and books. He is something of a non-fiction specialist.

In his internationally acclaimed book Straphanger (Henry Holt, HarperCollins), Grescoe visited fourteen cities around the world, from Bogotá to Tokyo, to look at which places are getting the sustainable mobility formula right. He is also a leading voice on urbanism, whose writing on cities has appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times, The Guardian, Monocle, and The Atlantic's CityLab. A familiar presence on CBC radio, television, and NPR, he has been named one of the top influencers on the theme of urban transportation on Twitter.

op-ed: short for opposite editorial, the page of special features usually opposite the editorial page that contains comment on the news and articles on particular subjects （报纸的）专栏版，评论版

For more info: 

http://tarasgrescoe.com/index.html