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决胜六级--简答+改错7

时间:2021-09-07 10:50:32 大学英语 我要投稿

决胜六级--简答+改错(7)

 

TEST 7

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Years before President Bill Clinton came to Washington with his campaign pledge to spend an additional $20, 000 million annually on America’s infrastructure “to develop the world’s best communication, transportation, and environmental systems,” economists and others were talking about the need to spend more on public works. Their debate has been almost entirely about one question: how much more? Usually overlooked in these discussions is the real infrastructure dilemma of the 21st century—not how much to spend but how to decide what to build and where to build it. ?

For several reasons, the old ways of deciding these matters simply do not work anymore. Americans today are far more skeptical about the value of new roads, bridges, and sewagetreatment plants especially when they are located in their own backyards. Their faith that decisions about public works can be safely left in the hands of public officials, engineers, and other technical experts are gone.

Reflecting in 1985 upon the final demise of Westway, the proposed highway along Manhattan’s West Side that had been held up for 30 years, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York wrote, “there is a kind of stasis that is beginning to settle into our public life. We cannot reach decisions. Central Park could not conceivably be built today as it was when there was enough power in (government) to make the decision. We don’t have that capacity. ”?

The persistence of the public works pork barrel— funding blatantly political projects—has also contributed to public skepticism. In the same year that Moynihan decried the death of Westway, local politicians celebrated the opening of

the $1, 800 million Tennessee?Tombigbee Waterway, recently described by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as “a broken promise. ” A classic pork barrel project, the waterway carries only one?tenth the commercial barge traffic that had been projected.

Questions:

?1. Eco