Reading Practice 22

          By the late nineteenth century, the focus for the engineers and builders of tunnels was beginning to shift from Europe to the United States and especially New York, where the rivers encircling Manhattan captured the imagination of tunnelers and challenged their ingenuity. The first to accept the challenge was a somewhat mysterious Californian named DeWitt Clinton Haskin, who turned up in New York in the 1870's with a proposal to tunnel through the silt under the Hudson River between Manhattan and Jersey City.

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Reading practice 21

          In 1781 twelve families trooped north from Mexico to California. On a stream along the desert's edge they built a settlement called Los Angeles. For many years it was a market town where nearby farmers and ranchers met to trade.

          Then in 1876 a railroad linked Los Angeles to San Francisco and, through San Francisco to the rest of the country. The next year farmers sent their first trainload of oranges east. By a new railroad provided a direct route between Los Angeles and Chicago.

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Reading practice 20

          Lucinda Childs's spare and orderly dances have both mystified and mesmerized audiences for more than a decade. Like other so-called "postmodern" choreographers. Childs sees dance as pure form Her dances are mathematical explorations of geometric shapes, and her dancers are expressionless, genderless instruments who etch intricate patterns on the floor in precisely timed. repetitive sequences of relatively simple steps. The development of Childs's career, from its beginning in the now legendary Judson Dance Theater. paralleled the development of minimalist art, although the choreographer herself has taken issue with those critics who describe her work as minimalist. In her view, each of her dances is simply "an intense experience of intense looking and listening," in addition to performing with her troupe, the Lucinda Childs Dance Company. Childs has appeared in the avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach, in two of Broadway plays, and in the films Jeonne d'Iman by Marie Jimenez and 21:12 Piano Bor.

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Reading Practice 19

          The difference between a liquid and a gas is obvious under the conditions of temperature and pressure commonly found at the surface of the Earth. A liquid can be kept in an open container and fills it to the level of a free surface. A gas forms no free surface but tends to diffuse throughout the space available; it must therefore be kept in a closed container or held by a gravitation field, as in the case of a planet's atmosphere. The distinction was a prominent feature of early theories describing the phases of matter. In the nineteenth century, for example. one theory maintained that a liquid could be "dissolved" in a vapor without losing its identity. and another theory held that the two phases are made up of different kinds of molecules:

liquidons and gasons. The theories now prevailing take a quite different approach by emphasizing what liquids and gases have in common. They are both forms of matter that have no permanent structure, and they both flow readily. They are fluids.

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Reading Practice 18

          Central Park, emerging from a period of abuse and neglect, remains one of the most popular attractions in New York City, with half a million out-of-towners among the more than 3 million people who visit the park yearly. About 15 million individual visits are made each year.

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Reading Practice 16

The first navigational lights in the New World were probably lanterns hung at harbor entrances. The first lighthouse was put up by the Massachusetts Bay Colony In 1766 on Little Brewster Island at the entrance to Boston Harbor. Paid for and maintained by light dues levied on ships, the original beacon was blown up in 1776. By then there were only a dozen or so true lighthouses in the colonies. Little over a century later, there were 700 lighthouses.

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Reading Practice: 15

          Anthropologists have pieced together the little they know about the history of left - handedness and right - handedness from indirect evidence. Though early men and women did not leave written records, they did leave tools, bones, and pictures. Stone Age hand axes and hatchets were made from stones that were carefully chipped away to form sharp cutting edges. In some. the pattern of chipping shows that these tools and weapons were made by right  handed people. designed to fit comfortably into a right hand. Other Stone Age implements were made by or for left-handers Prehistoric pictures. painted on the walls of caves. provide further clues to the handedness of ancient people. A right - hander finds it easier to draw faces of people and animals facing toward the left. whereas a left - hander finds it easier to draw faces facing toward the right. Both kinds of faces have been found in ancient painting. On the whole. the evidence seems to indicate that prehistoric people were either ambidextrous or about equally likely to be left - or right - handed.

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