This week we have
activity of reading comprehension. We have done such exercise before and we
know that comprehension is one of the
main goals of reading. Comprehension is mainly related to determining the main idea and
summarizing the contents in the given article. Good comprehension skills enable
to remember information and express them. Article given here is on “City
and natural environment”. Each paragraph in article is marked with and alphabet
and in the exercise there are questions related to particular paragraph and
also article as a whole. Go through the article, download the exercise and
attempt it. Verify your attempt by downloading the answer sheet. Enjoy …..and
keep talking…..
City and Natural
Environment
A While cities and their metropolitan areas
have always interacted with and shaped the natural environment, it is only
recently that historians have begun to consider this relationship. During our
own time, the tension between natural and urbanized areas has increased, as the
spread of metropolitan populations and urban land uses has reshaped and
destroyed natural landscapes and environments.
B The relationship between the city and the
natural environment has actually been circular, with cities having massive
effects on the natural environment, while the natural environment, in turn, has
profoundly shaped urban configurations. Urban history is filled with stories
about how city dwellers contended with the forces of nature that threatened
their lives. Nature not only caused many of the annoyances of daily urban life,
such as bad weather and pests, but it also gave rise to natural disasters and
catastrophes such as floods, fires, and earthquakes. In order to protect
themselves and their settlements against the forces of nature, cities built
many defences including flood walls and dams, earthquake-resistant buildings,
and storage places for food and water. At times, such protective steps
sheltered urbanites against the worst natural furies, but often their own
actions – such as building under the shadow of volcanoes, or in
earthquake-prone zones – exposed them to danger from natural hazards.
C City populations require food, water, fuel,
and construction materials, while urban industries need natural materials for
production purposes. In order to fulfill these needs, urbanites increasingly
had to reach far beyond their boundaries. In the nineteenth century, for
instance, the demands of city dwellers for food produced rings of garden farms
around cities. In the twentieth century, as urban populations increased, the
demand for food drove the rise of large factory farms. Cities also require
fresh water supplies in order to exist – engineers built waterworks, dug wells
deeper and deeper into the earth looking for groundwater, and dammed and
diverted rivers to obtain water supplies for domestic and industrial uses. In
the process of obtaining water from distant locales, cities often transformed
them, making deserts where there had been fertile agricultural areas.
D Urbanites had to seek locations to dispose
of the wastes they produced. Initially, they placed wastes on sites within the
city, polluting the air, land, and water with industrial and domestic
effluents. As cities grew larger, they disposed of their wastes by transporting
them to more distant locations. Thus, cities constructed sewerage systems for
domestic wastes. They usually discharged the sewage into neighbouring
waterways, often polluting the water supply of downstream cities.
The air
and the land also became dumps for waste disposal. In the late nineteenth
century, coal became the preferred fuel for industrial, transportation, and
domestic use. But while providing an inexpensive and plentiful energy supply,
coal was also very dirty. The cities that used it suffered from air
contamination and reduced sunlight, while the cleaning tasks of householders
were greatly increased.
E In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, reformers began demanding urban environmental cleanups and public
health improvements. Women's groups often took the lead in agitating for clean
air and clean water, showing a greater concern than men in regard to quality of
life and health-related issues. The replacement of the horse, first by electric
trolleys and then by the car, brought about substantial improvements in street
and air sanitation. The movements demanding clean air, however, and reduction
of waterway pollution were largely unsuccessful. On balance, urban sanitary
conditions were probably somewhat better in the 1920s than in the late
nineteenth century, but the cost of improvement often was the exploitation of
urban hinterlands for water supplies, increased downstream water pollution, and
growing automobile congestion and pollution.
F In the decades after the 1940s, city
environments suffered from heavy pollution as they sought to cope with
increased automobile usage, pollution from industrial production, new varieties
of chemical pesticides and the wastes of an increasingly consumer-oriented
economy. Cleaner fuels and smoke control laws largely freed cities during the
1940s and 1950s of the dense smoke that they had previously suffered from.
Improved urban air quality resulted largely from the substitution of natural
gas and oil for coal and the replacement of the steam locomotive by the
diesel-electric. However, great increases in automobile usage in some larger
cities produced the new phenomenon of smog, and air pollution replaced smoke as
a major concern.
G During these decades, the suburban
out-migration, which had begun in the nineteenth century with commuter trains
and streetcars and accelerated because of the availability and convenience of
the automobile, now increased to a torrent, putting major strains on the
formerly rural and undeveloped metropolitan fringes. To a great extent,
suburban layouts ignored environmental considerations, making little provision
for open space, producing endless rows of resource-consuming and
fertilizer-dependent lawns, contaminating groundwater through leaking septic
tanks, and absorbing excessive amounts of fresh water and energy. The growth of
the outer city since the 1970s reflected a continued preference on the part of
many people in the western world for space-intensive single-family houses
surrounded by lawns, for private automobiles over public transit, and for the
development of previously untouched areas. Without better planning for land use
and environmental protection, urban life will, as it has in the past, continue to
damage and stress the natural environment.
Download Exercise on the article: Exercise
Download Answer key to the exercise: Answer key