TEXT C In the late 1960s many
people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems, and
new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized: Ecologists pointed out
that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public
transportation and parking lot capacities. Skyscrapers are also
lavish comsumers, and wasters of electric power. In one recent year, the
addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City
raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120,000 kilowattsenough to
supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
Glass-walled skyscraper’s can be especially wasteful. The beat loss (or
gain)through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that through
a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on
heating and air-conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to
use double- glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or
gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled
skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring
buildings. Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city’s
sanitation facilities, too. ( if fully occupied, the two World Trade Center
towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage
each year-- as much as a city the size of Stanford, Connecticut, which has a
population of more than 109,000. ) Skyscrapers also interfere
with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. In
Boston in the late 1960s, some people even feared that shadows from skyscrapers
would kill the grass on Boston Common. Still, people continue
to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built
them--personal ambition, civic pride, and the desire of owners to have the
largest possible amount of rentable space. According to the passage, in the late 1960s some residents of Boston were concerned with which aspect of skyscrapers
A.The noise from their construction B.The removal of trees from building sites C.The harmful effects on the city’s grass D.The high cost of rentable office space