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TEXT F
First read the following question.
32. The passage focuses on ___.
A. the history and future of London
B. London’s manufacturing skills
C. London’s status as a financial centrer
D. the past and present roles of London
Now go through Text F quickly and answer question 32.
What is London for? To put the question another way, why was London, by 190 0, incomparably the largest city in the world, which it remained until the bomba rdments of the Luftwaffe? There could be many answers to this question, but any history of London will rehearse three broad explanations. One is the importance of its life as a port. When the Thames turned to ice in February 1855,50,000 men were put out of work, and there were bread riots from those whose liveliboods h ad been frozen with the river. Today, the Thames could be frozen for a year with out endangering the livelihoods of any but a few pleasure-boatmen.
The second major cause of London’s wealth and success was that it was easi l y the biggest manufacturing centre in Europe. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Dutch looms and the stocking knitting frame were first pioneered in London. The vast range of London’s manufacturing skills is another fact; almos t any item you can name was manufactured in London during the days of its prosper ity. In 1851, 13.75 percent of the manufacturing work-force of Great Britain was based in London. By 1961, this had dramatically reduced. By 1993, there were a mere 328,000 Londoners engaged in manufacturing. In other words, by our own time s, two of the chief reasons for London’s very existence-its life as a pert and as a centre of manufacture-had dwindled out of existence.
London’s third great function, since the seventeenth century, has been tha t of national and international bourse: the exchange of stocks and shares, bankin g, commerce and, increasingly, insurance. Both In wood and Francis Sheppard, in London: A history, manage to make these potentially dry matters vivid to the gen eral reader, and both authors assure us that “The City” in the financial sense i s still as important as ever it was. Both, however, record the diminution of the City as an architectural and demographic entity, with the emptying of many city offices (since the advent of the computer much of the work can be done anywhere ) and the removal of many distinctive landmarks.
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