英语六级阅读讲义

大学英语六级阅读讲义

第一部分（补充阅读）

Text 1

Aristotle wrote that men come together in cities to live, but stay in them to live the good life. It was the Greeks who invented the idea of the city, and urbanity continues as a thriving tradition. But in the first decade of the 21st century, urban life is changing. “Cities are now junctions in the flows of people, information, finance and freight,” says Nigel Harris, a professor of development planning. “They’re less and less places where people live and work.”

The enlargement of the European Union in December in 2002 has given residents of up to 13 new member nations freedom of movement within its borders. At the same time, an additional 13.5 million immigrants a year will be needed in the EU just to keep a stable ratio between workers and pensioners over the next half century. All this mobility will make Europe’s cities nodes of nomadism, linked to each other by high-speed trains and cheap airline flights. The bustle around airports and train stations will make the crowds in Europe’s great piazza look thin by comparison. Urban designers, with a freshly pricked interest in transience rather than stasis, are even now dreaming up cityscapes that focus on flows of people and fungible uses for buildings.

Public spaces are due for a revamp. Earlier architects conceived of train stations as single buildings; today’s designers are thinking of them as transit zones that link to the city around them, pouring travelers into bus stations and surrounding shops, In Amsterdam, urban planner Ben van Berkel, co-director of the design firm of UN Studio, has developed what he calls Deep Planning Strategy, which inverts the traditional “top-down” approach: the creation of a space comes before the flow of people through it. With 3-D modeling and ani mation, he’s able to look at different population groups use public spaces at different times of the day. He uses the data to design spaces that accommodate mobs at rush hour and sparser crowds at other times.

The growing mobility of Europe has inspired a debate about the look and feel of

urban sprawl. “Up until now, all our cultural heritage has been concentrated in the city center,” notes Prof. Heinrich Moding of the German Institute of Urban Affairs. “But we’ve got to imagine how it’s possible to have jo yful vibrancy in these outlying parts, so that they’re not just about garages, highways and gasoline tanks.” The designs of new building are also changing to anticipate the emerging city as a way station. Buildings have been seen as disconnecting, isolating, defining. But increasingly, the quality of space that’s in demand is movement.

Text 2

Pain, unfortunately, is a horrible necessity of life. It protects people by alerting them to things that might injure them. But some long-term pain has nothing to do with any obvious injury. One estimate suggests that one in six adults suffer from a “chronic pain” condition.

Steve McMahon, a pain researcher at King’s College, London, says that if skin is damaged, for instance with a hot iron, an area of sensitivity develops around the outside of the burn where although untouched and undamaged by the iron the behavior of the nerve fibers is disrupted. As a result, heightened sensitivity and abnormal pain sensations occur in the surrounding skin. Chronic pain, he says, may similarly be caused not by damage to the body, but because weak pain signals become amplified.

This would also help explain why chronic pains such as lower-back pain and osteoarthritis fail to respond well to traditional pain therapies. But now an entirely new kind of drug, called Tanezumab, has been developed. It is an antibody for a protein called nerve growth factor (NGF), which is vital for new nerve growth during development. NGF, it turns out, is also crucial in the regulation of the sensitization of pain in chronic conditions.

Kenneth Verburg, one of the researchers involved in the development of Tanezumab at Pfizer, says it is not exactly clear what role NGF plays in normal