2. 外语
  3. Since the turn of the century, Londoners have expressed a preference for suburban locations as more pleasant and safer to bring

Since the turn of the century, Londoners have expressed a preference for suburban locations as more pleasant and safer to bring

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问题     Since the turn of the century, Londoners have expressed a preference for suburban locations as more pleasant and safer to bring up children. The middle classes fear urban public life so much, they are willing to trade off the daily journey to work in favor of safety and seclusion at home. In New York, people view the streets, sidewalks, plazas and subways as areas of combat rather than civility where the goal is not enjoyment but survival. 【T1】This process of detachment and withdrawal has been encouraged by the motor car, bringing in its wake difficult pedestrian access key sites cut off by ring roads, and multi-storey car parks which are particularly threatening to women. The cinema has partly given way to the home video, and luxury housing developments around London feature high levels of security surveillance.
    In New York, new buildings are filled with "defensible space", gales and guards to funnel you this way or that because drug dealers can make a public space their own in a few days.
    The unrestrained growth of incivilities—drunks, tramps, rowdy youth, prostitutes, and other disreputables—had decreased communal control. This had led to more actual crime, increased the fear of crime, encouraged withdrawal into private spaces, so further reducing commitment to neighborhoods and encouraging greater incivilities.
    【T2】The result is that people then create a shield for themselves in public places; they minimize expressions and body contact, choose seating to signal what might happen next, they run. Since beggars probably evoked mixed reactions of pity, embarrassment, or fear, their high visibility on the streets may well lead people to avoid certain places.
    【T3】It is incivilities like these which surely make people fearful in cities and which cannot be dismissed as Home officials tend to do, as irrational fears. A woman’s fearfulness about travelling on the Tube, for example, cannot be lightly dismissed on the grounds that statistically she is less likely to suffer an assault than a young man. Her fears are fuelled by all these surrounding incivilities, plus gestures, sexual innuendos, or remarks from youths in the carriage. If a couple of young men start smoking on the Tube, the tension in the carriage is palpable because people know what the reaction is likely to be if they are told to stop. Women or old people feel more vulnerable than young men because they arc more vulnerable. When considering risks, policy makers tend to emphasize statistical infrequency and downplay the gravity of outcomes.
    London cries out for some kind of coherent city planning. But the quality of its citizens’ lives won’t be improved unless these incivilities, which are so much more difficult to quantify, are properly addressed.
【T3】
选项
答案正是这类不礼貌的言行使人们在城市感到恐惧，而内政部的官员往往将不礼貌的言行视为缺乏理性的恐惧。例如，不能因为女人遭到袭击的几率低于年轻男子便对女人的地铁恐惧症等闲视之。
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