良志教育六级阅读练习 - 学生.doc

Passage 1 Signs:the Most Useful Thing We Pay No Attention to [A] Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us were on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, were late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal. [B] Bad signs can send perfectly ordinary citizens into spirals of obsession. Take Richard Ankrom, a Los Angeles artist who thought the junction of the 110 freeway and the 5 freeway was badly marked. In 2001, he put on an outfit that looked like the ones Caltrans highway workers wore, climbed up onto a freeway gantry, and mounted an aluminum sign hed manufactured himself according to state specs. The sign stayed up for nine months without anyone noticing what hed done; when the story leaked to the press and Caltrans finally cottoned on, the agency left the sign up for eight more years. [C] Or consider Leslie Gallery Dilworth, a Philadelphia architect who took a road trip with her husband through Spain in the 1980s. Throughout the journey, theyd marveled at the simplicity of the European road signs, which were easy to use even though neither of them spoke Spanish. Upon their return to Philly, they got lost on the way from the airport to their house, when a bad set of signs directed them to a local dump. Dilworth was so struck by her own citys inhospitality that she spent much of the next decade working with the city and local stakeholders revamping Philadelphias sign systems. Today, shes the CEO of the Society for Environmental Graphic Design, the prem