Unit 10 The Idiocy of Urban LifeKey to the Exercises Text comprehensionI .Decide which of the following best states the authors purpose of writing.BII.Judge, according to the text, whether the following statements are true or false.1. F (Refer to Paragraph 2. It is human beings who bring the rat race into human society.) 2. F (Refer to Paragraph 2. It tells us that the opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places.)3. T (Refer to Paragraph 4. . they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea around the Hamptons, spreading over the Long Island potato fields whose earlier solitude was presumably the reason why they first went there.)4. T (Refer to Paragraph 4. The main streets of Americas small towns ?are now strips of boutiques. Old-fashioned barbers become unisex hairdressing salons.)5. F (Refer to Paragraphs 5 and 6. According to the author, work in the rural areas is meaningful whereas the frenzy of the urban work hours is pointless. When the farmer walks to his farm in the morning, he is doing something significant. By contrast, the city worker is starting the first idiocy of his day when he is getting ready for his journey to work at this time of the day.)6. T (Refer to Paragraph 7. The windows in the modern office buildings are perhaps the most symbolic lunacy of all. Even on the fairest spring or fall day the workers cannot put their heads outside.) III. Answer the following questions.1. Refer to Paragraph 1. The author mentions rats at the beginning of the article for the purpose of contrasting rats with human beings. In a sense, both rats and human beings are city dwellers, but there are differences between them in terms of life in the city. As natural inhabitants of the city, rats are social creatures and lead a stable urban life. By contrast, most human dwellers do not enjoy the urban life but try to live outside the city boundaries; and they live an individualistic and atomized rather than gregarious life. Therefore, relatively speaking, rats are true city dwellers.2. Refer to Paragraph 3. The idiocy of the practice lies in the pretence of the city dwellers. For one thing, they disdain rural life on the one hand, and on the other hand they try to simulate it by creating large or small patches of greenery around their suburb, exurb or rururb residences. For another, while they intend to live a rural life by going to the country, they have in fact spoiled the natural features of the rural areas and created urban surroundings where they have settled down. As a result their purpose fails in the end.3. Refer to Paragraph 6. The authors saying so reflects his attitude towards office work in the city. Unlike farming which is part of the rural home life, joyless work in the city is separated, both physically and emotionally, from home life and consequently causes unnecessary frenzy. The workers going to and returning from work wastes a lot of time and thus is pointless, yet the worker not only accepts but even seeks it. Hence the idiocy of the journey to work.4. Refer to Paragraph 8. The quoted statement describes in what environment the city dweller lives and works. With the windows that never open, the modern office, artificially cooled in summer and heated in winter, alienates the worker from the true natural world. The home surroundings are no better. They provide the dweller with no true sense of the seasons either. In general, the city dweller is removed from nature and submerged in a man-made environment every day.5. Refer to Paragraph 9. This phenomenon is caused by the demerits of office work. Compared with physical labor in rural life, office work in the city needs very little physical exertion, but it requires long-time sitting with the same posture every day. Even the after-work exercises cannot compensate for the damage done to the physical constitution of the worker during work hours. This accounts for the round-shoulderedness of Americans.IV. Explain in your own words the following sentences.1. Rats make city life courteous and refined when they dominate the city deep at night. 2. City dwellers create all kinds of city vogues in the country, for they will not live without these fashionable things. 3. These windows are disgraceful because they put the lives of office workers in danger if a fire should occur.4. A lawn in the backyard and a few spindle-shaped trees struggling for life are not enough to give the dweller any true sense of the season changes.Structural analysis of the textThe text can be divided into the following three parts: Part 1, Paragraphs 1?: the author presents the thesis of his argument, i.e. aggressively individualistic and atomized urban life goes against both the purpose of the city and human nature, and thus is foolish. Part 2, Paragraphs 3?: the author provides evidence for the idiocy of urban life. Part