2018年6月大学英语六级听力常考时文：Suburbanization

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　　1.What was the city like before the emergence of the industrial city? It
was a samll highly ...
        　　2.How were goods conveyed before the second quarter of the 19th century? By
...
        　　3.What was one of the purposes of the cities appropriating their industrial
neighbors? To enlarge their ...
        　　4.What reinforced the first phase of mass-scale suburbanization? The
simultaneous emergence of ...
        　　If by "suburb" is meant an urban margin that grows more rapidly than its
already developed interior, the process of suburbanization began during the
emergence of the industrial city in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. Before that period the city was a small highly compact cluster in which
people moved about on foot and goods were conveyed by horse and cart. But the
early factories built in the 1840‘s were located along waterways and near
railheads at the edges of cities, and housing was needed for the thousands of
people drawn by the prospect of employment. In time, the factories were
surrounded by proliferating mill towns of apartments and row houses that abutted
the older, main cities. As a defense against this encroachment and to enlarge
their tax bases, the cities appropriated their industrial neighbors. In 1854,
for example, the city of Philadelphia annexed most of Philadelphia County.
Similar municipal maneuvers took place in Chicago and in New York. Indeed, most
great cities of the United States achieved such status only by incorporating the
communities along their borders. With the acceleration of industrial growth came
acute urban crowding and accompanying social stress-conditions that began to
approach disastrous proportions when, in 1888, the first commercially successful
electric traction line was developed. Within a few years the horse-drawn
trolleys were retired and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and connected
every major urban area, fostering a wave of suburbanization that transformed the
compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis. This first phase of
mass-scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous emergence of the
urban Middle Class, whose desires for homeownership in neighborhoods far from
the aging inner city were satisfied by the developers of single-family housing
tracts.