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  3. The city, Rousseau once suggested, is "the abyss of the human species. "And while that judgment represents a fairly 18th century

The city, Rousseau once suggested, is "the abyss of the human species. "And while that judgment represents a fairly 18th century

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问题     The city, Rousseau once suggested, is "the abyss of the human species. "And while that judgment represents a fairly 18th century view of the unpleasant industrial life, present examples don’t necessarily dispute it. Many metropolitan areas have developed into dense grids of humanity surrounded by soulless office parks and a few nice, leafy streets.
    Yet this, according to Edward Glaeser, can be a good thing. Triumph of the City, the Harvard University economics professor’s deeply researched manifesto on the importance of urban life to, among other things, business and innovation, suggests the most important investment in any city is human capital—or, more simply, population. His book convincingly argues that concentrated populations can have "magical consequences. " A steady infusion of human capital helped transform New York City from a manufacturing hub into the world’s financial capital.
    Millions of Americans embrace the suburbs because they offer affordable housing, better schools, and decent-sized backyards. However, Glaeser also believes the growth of suburbia typifies a nearsighted view of conservation. All that air-conditioning and driving comes at a cost. The environmentalists who’ve worked for laws that make it impossible to build in temperate regions have insidiously pushed the sprawl to some growing southern district -along the way facilitating a carbon emissions nightmare.
    However, Glaeser isn’t out to attack the suburban life; instead, he’s hoping to increase the number of options. He points out that many cities to a large extent are fast becoming provinces for the truly wealthy. Middle-class strivers have to take the commuter train home. Glaeser’s solution is simple: Where land is scarce, density becomes vital. Cities that cannot build out must build up. Freed from restrictive regulations, Glaeser notes Houston has built up and out to become the fourth-largest city in the U. S. Owing mainly to affordable housing and the availability of jobs, an average family in high-density Houston is much better off than a comparable one in Queens or Staten Island.
    In Glaeser’s appraisal, cities must also aim for a sweet spot that combines good public schools and non-prohibitive zoning policies. From Bangalore to Vancouver, educational institutions and the freedom to build help produce the kind of successful hubs that attract human capital. Human capital makes reinvention possible but complicated. Detroit, Glaeser argues, suffered from too much specialization: Huge integrated car companies crowded out other ideas that could have fostered valuable results long before disaster struck the Big Three.
    The author’s prescription for Detroit, is to "shrink to greatness" by searching for fresh advantages. Glaeser believes cities are about people, not places or buildings. Does it make economic sense to resurrect Detroit when the cost of building a house is greater than the reward from selling it? It could have been cheaper, he notes, to hand every household in New Orleans $200,000 after Hurricane Katrina rather than pump vast quantities of public money into rebuilding a city of diminishing economic significance.
    Glaeser may be right. As the latest U. S. Census figures prove, the city’s capital is disappearing in droves.
New Orleans is cited as an example of cities______.
选项 A、searching actively for fresh advantages
B、failing to weigh rebuilding risks against returns
C、focusing on people instead of buildings
D、responding effectively to economic depression
答案B
解析 第六段作者对底特律面临的危机给出的建议是“缩小城市规模”。随后通过类比奥尔良市的例子反面证明其合理性。由第四句的虚拟语气可知，新奥尔良市事实上是费大钱重建城市而结果不讨好。因此答案为[B]选项。
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