Listening Comprehension 3

Questions 11-15 are based on the following interview.

W: Remember the setting for the movie the Truman show？ It looked like a nice place to live. Well, for the most part, it wasn’t a set .The town actually exists and it was built on the concept of new Urbanism, the idea of using architecture and planning to nurture civic ties and to encourage interaction between neighbors. In central Florida, the World Disney Company is running its own experiment in new urbanism, a town called Celebration. Andrew Ross is a professor of American studies at New York University. He spent a year living in Celebration, getting to know the town and its people. Now Professor Ross, could you say something about this?

M: The town more or less borrows very heavily from new urbanized principles. That’s the town-planning movement that is pledged to create environmentally friendly alternatives to sprawl and to create communities around people rather than automobiles. But many aspects of that kind of design of town are really aimed at maximizing social interaction between residents.

W: And from your point of view, this would be laudable goals? I mean you go to some horrible sprawl communities and places like southern California, and you’ll see houses that only present garage doors to the street, and a community set-up where you absolutely have to drive to every single place and no one ever sees each other.

M: And what make Celebration unique? There are many things that make celebration unique but one of them is the very high level of media scrutiny. By the time I got there to spend my year in Celebration, this was a community of folks who are already the most scrutinized people on the planet and that generated a very high level of performance anxiety among the folks living there. Really, that trickle down all the way from the Disney boardrooms to the school restrooms, ceaselessly assessing how the community was doing, whether it was creating a vibrant sense of interaction and participation and whether it was being a success or a failure.

W: Now, despite all the planning that went into Celebration, it evolved in what turned out to be unpredictable ways. A lot of people were disappointed there, some people less disappointed.

M: A lot of folks who moved in there had very high expectations. A goodly number of them were Disney files, who had been accustomed to high levels of customer satisfaction from the company in their vacation experiences. Obviously, those high expectations would be inevitably thwarted at some level. But most folks, and we are talking about a self-selected group of pioneers who moved in there, were people who had moved from the cheerless isolation of a lot of other suburban places, were very hungry for community, very much looking for a town where they could fully participate and create and define the sense of community there.

W: What about the attempts of the planners to engineer community where there will be a mixture of incomes? Was that effective?

M: Initially it was effective and this is highly unusual in the American housing landscape to find fairly pricy houses just a spit away from multi-family rental apartment buildings. You just don’t find that anywhere in American housing landscape. The problem is that a lot of new Urbanist Towns like Celebration become commercially successful and Celebration has indeed been that. What happens is the housing prices rise and the low-income folks can’t afford to live there anymore. That’s already beginning to happen. There were working-class people who I knew in Celebration who had moved in there as pioneers and Lord knows how they made ends meet and they did. Certainly, it wasn’t cheap to live in town but increasingly those low-income folks won’t be able to afford that.

11. About which of the following is Professor Ross being interviewed?

12. Which of the following is not promised by new urbanized principles?

13 . What, among many other things, makes the town of Celebration unique?

14 . What can we probably tell about Celebration from the interview?

15. Which of the following statements is true about those who had?