专业英语教案-四年级概要.doc

Unit Seven (A) THE SKYSCRAPER A generation ago, it was still possible to speak of the skyscraper as an American phenomenon. Of course there were tall buildings elsewhere, but few of them ―they seemed always to be somewhat out of place（不相称）, odd intrusions（侵入）of the American spirit into other cultures. The real skyscrapers, the important ones, were almost always American ―and the real skyscraper cities, like New York, Chicago, and Houston, were absolutely American. 一代人以前，还有可能说摩天大楼是一种美国现象。的确是那会儿到处都有高楼，但很少是摩天大楼。它们似乎总是显得有些格格不入，似乎是美国精神对别国文化的古怪侵犯。真正的摩天大厦，那些最重要的作品，几乎总是美国货，同时真正的摩天大楼式的城市，如纽约、芝加哥和休斯敦，都绝对是美国的。 Now, as we approach the end of the century, it is no longer so. America owns the history of the skyscraper, but other countries, other cultures, seem to control more and more of its present and, it seems certain, its future. The sheer（完全的、绝对的）quantity of skyscrapers that have been built outside the United States is astonishing; cities that through the 1970s had no very tall buildings at all seem now to have dozens of them, and it is no longer possible to think of the skylines of these cities as representing some kind of intervention（介入）of an alien（海外）American economic, technological and architectural culture. Skyscrapers are now the culture of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore and Bangkok, not to mention Frankfurt, Paris, San Paulo and Sydney. In the latest list of the one hundred tallest buildings in the world prepared by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat（栖息地，自然环境）, 35 of the structures ―more than one-third ―were not in North America. Skyscrapers are now commonplace in almost every large urban area of the developed world, if not in older historic cores, then on the outskirts（市郊）, as around Paris, and they have redefined the nature of urbanity（文雅气质）in our time. 如今，随着我们接近世纪的尾声，事情不再是这样了。美国拥有着摩天楼的历史，但是别的国家，另外的文化，看起来越来越多地主宰着摩天大楼的现状，甚至一定程度上，和它的未来。在美国之外的地区已经建起的摩天大楼的绝对数量是令人震惊的，那些在贯穿整个七十年代里没有什么高楼的城市，现在似乎已经成打地拥有了摩天大楼，而且不再可能认为这些城市的天际线是代表着某种美国经济、技术和建筑文化的海外传