雅思阅读 65: Cities That Move Underground（向地下发展的城市）

改编自 Royal Society / Bloomberg（2025年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article/383/2308/20240579

Reading Passage

A. Most of what a modern city does happens invisibly beneath its streets. Sewers, tunnels, subway lines, cables and pipes occupy a layered underworld that planners increasingly treat not as an afterthought but as a second city. This shift is driven by an old problem made urgent by a new one. The old problem is congestion: as surface land grows scarcer and more expensive, digging downward often costs less than building upward or outward. The new problem is heat. As summers lengthen and cities themselves warm through the asphalt and concrete they contain, below-ground space offers something almost no above-ground room can match — a temperature that stays nearly the same all year. A few metres beneath the pavement, the earth acts as a natural insulator, cool in July and never freezing in January. Engineers call this thermal inertia, and it is pushing urban designers to ask whether offices, warehouses and even homes might live better underground than on the surface. The argument is gathering force because the surface above is becoming less hospitable: summer after summer, record-breaking heat turns the open city into a liability that air conditioning only makes worse.

B. The idea is not as novel as it sounds. London's underground infrastructure is already a century old and is being extended on a vast scale. The city's deep Tube tunnels were dug in the Victorian era, when cholera epidemics forced engineers such as Joseph Bazalgette to redesign the invisible city beneath it. That legacy culminated in the Thames Tideway Tunnel, a 25-kilometre "super-sewer" completed at a cost of more than four billion pounds, built to intercept overflow before it reaches the river. Yet the same network that carries passengers has itself become a victim of heat. Trains, braking systems, lighting and the bodies of passengers pump warmth into tunnels that were never designed to cool themselves. On the deepest lines, platform temperatures can climb well above 30 degrees Celsius in summer, and engineers warn that without intervention the tunnels could become dangerous. New trains finally bring air conditioning to the deep lines — a feat achieved by redesigning the wheels and undercarriage to free the space needed for cooling equipment. The improvement is welcome but partial; it cools the carriages, not the tunnels themselves, which continue to absorb every watt of heat the system generates.

C. The thermal logic cuts both ways. The earth's stable temperature makes underground rooms cheap to heat and cool in winter and summer alike, reducing a building's energy demand for climate control by a large margin. Proponents of underground architecture point to natural disaster resilience as well: buried space is untouched by tornadoes, surface flooding and the extreme swings of an increasingly volatile atmosphere. For coastal cities facing rising seas, a floor below the tide line is a floor that floodwater cannot easily reach. Advocates argue that putting roads, parking and storage underground returns the surface to parks and pedestrians, reclaiming the city for people rather than machines. In a world where surface land is the scarcest resource of all, the argument for going down is, at first glance, almost irresistible. Some architects go further, imagining a network of buried roads and halls that would be untouched by the heat domes now stalling the world's temperate cities, trading a view of the sky for air that never warms past a comfortable eighteen degrees.

D. Yet underground living carries hidden costs that have cooled enthusiasm. Humidity is the quiet enemy. Unless it is actively controlled, an underground room is damper than an equivalent one above ground, and persistent moisture breeds mould, which in turn provokes allergies and respiratory problems. Daylight, or its absence, matters even more. Studies of people who spend long periods below ground consistently find that they suffer from disrupted sleep and mood, because the body's internal clock depends on natural light to set its rhythm. Ventilation is another constraint: removing hot air from a buried tunnel requires shafts to the surface, and drilling new shafts through a densely built historic city is slow, expensive and structurally risky. London cannot simply "add air conditioning" to its deepest lines because the century-old tunnels have nowhere to exhaust the heat. The dream of a comfortable underground city is therefore less about the earth's temperature than about the engineering of air, light and humidity that a buried life demands. A trial at a disused London platform once showed a ten-to-fifteen-degree reduction in air temperature near a convection panel, yet even that modest success depended on ducts and pumps the size of rooms, a reminder that going underground simply relocates the ventilation problem rather than removing it.

E. The most realistic future, then, is not a city that abandons the surface but one that divides its functions according to where each is best placed. Storage, machinery, utilities and transit already belong underground, and climate control may push more of them there as surface temperatures rise. Offices and homes, however, will remain tied to daylight and views for as long as human biology is what it is. The underground city is unlikely to become a place people live; it is far more likely to become a place that quietly runs the one they do live in. What changes is how deliberately we design it. Planners now speak of mapping the subsurface as carefully as they map the streets above, so that the next century's tunnels avoid the mistakes of the last. Beneath our feet, a second urban fabric is being stitched together — invisible, but no longer accidental. Treating the subsurface as a planned layer rather than a buried afterthought could save a city billions in cooling and transport, and reclaim a surface that cars have crowded out. The question is no longer whether the city below exists, but whether we will design it on purpose.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The arguments in favour of going underground ii. The natural insulation of the earth iii. London's buried past — and its heat problem iv. The hidden costs of a buried life v. A realistic division of functions vi. Why above-ground offices are cheaper vii. The history of Victorian railways

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. Why is below-ground space attractive in a warming climate? A. It is always dark and silent. B. Its temperature stays nearly constant throughout the year. C. It requires no maintenance. D. It is free to build.

6. What problem has emerged in London's deep Tube tunnels? A. They have become too cold in winter. B. Heat from trains and passengers has made them uncomfortably hot. C. They collapsed because of poor Victorian engineering. D. They carry more water than sewage.

7. According to paragraph C, what is a benefit of underground construction? A. It lets the surface be returned to parks and pedestrians. B. It removes the need for air conditioning. C. It increases daylight in offices. D. It eliminates humidity.

8. Why does the writer say London cannot simply "add air conditioning" to its deepest lines? A. The tunnels have no way to exhaust hot air to the surface. B. Passengers refuse to use it. C. The trains run too fast. D. The tunnels are too wide.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The Thames Tideway Tunnel cost more than four billion pounds.
10. Underground rooms are naturally drier than above-ground rooms.
11. Lack of natural light can disrupt people's sleep and mood.
12. Most people will choose to live permanently underground within ten years.
13. Joseph Bazalgette designed the first deep Tube trains.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The earth acts as a natural (14) ________, keeping underground temperatures stable, but buried spaces must be actively ventilated and dehumidified, otherwise (15) ________ can develop and damage people's health.

答案与解析

← 上一篇 | 返回雅思焦点 | 下一篇 →