Passage Two

Questions 6 to 10 are based on the following passage.

     Central Park, emerging from a period of abuse and neglect, remains one of the most popular attractions in New York City, with half a million out-of-towners among the more than 3 million people who visit the park yearly. About 15 million individual visits are made each year.

     Summer is the season for softball, concerts and Shakespeare; fall is sunning; winter is wonderful for sledding, skating and skiing; and springtime is the loveliest of all. It was all planned that way.

     About 130 years ago Frederic Olmsted and his collaborator Calvert Vaux submitted their landscaping plan for a rectangular parcel two miles north of the town's center. The barren swamp was reported as “a spot where miasmic (瘴气的) odors pollute every breath of air." It took 16 years for workers with pickaxe and shovels to move 5 million cubic feet of earth and rock, and to plant half a million trees and shrubs, making a tribute to nature—a romantic 19th-century perception of nature.

     What exists today is essentially Olmsted and Vaux's plan, with more trees, buildings and roads. Landscape architects still speak reverently of Olmsted's genius and foresight, and the sensitive visitor can see the effects he sought.

The passage is mainly concerned with ______.

(67)

(66)

(64)

(65)

She dressed plainly because she could not dress well, but her unhappiness seemed to be deeper than one might expect. (63She seemed to feel that she had fallen from her proper station in life as a woman of wealth, beauty, grace, and charm.)She valued these above all else in life, yet she could not attain them. (64She cared nothing for caste or rank but only for a natural fineness, an instinct for what is elegant, and a suppleness of wit. )These would have made her the equal of the greatest ladies of the land. If only she could attain them...

    She suffered, feeling born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries. (65She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains. )(66All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry.) (67The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework aroused in her despairing regrets and distracted dreams.) She thought of silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, lit by tall bronze candelabra, and of two great footmen in knee breaches sleeping in big armchairs, made drowsy by the heavy warmth of the hot-air stove. She thought of long salons fitted up with ancient silk, of delicate furniture carrying priceless curiosities, and of coquettish perfumed boudoirs made for talks at five o’clock with intimate friends, with men famous and sought after, whom all women envy and whose attention they all desire.

                                                          (From The Necklace)

What is high tech?

When did the expression “state of the art” become popular in the US? Why?

(60)

(58)

(59)