2020年新高考II卷(海南卷)
C
In May 1987 the Golden Gate Bridge had a 50th birthday party. The bridge was closed to motor traffic so people could enjoy a walk across it. Organizers expected perhaps 50,000 people to show up. Instead, as many as 800, 000 crowded the roads to the bridge. By the time 250,000 were on the bridge, engineers noticed something terrible：the roadway was flattening under what turned out to be the heaviest load it had ever been asked to carry. Worse, it was beginning to sway(晃动). The authorities closed access to the bridge and tens of thousands of people made their way back to land. A disaster was avoided.
The story is one of scores in To Forgive Design：Understanding Failure, a book that is at once a love letter to engineering and a paean(赞歌)to its breakdowns. Its author, Dr. Henry Petroski, has long been writing about disasters. In this book, he includes the loss of the space shuttles(航天飞机)Challenger and Columbia, and the sinking of the Titanic.
Though he acknowledges that engineering works can fail because the person who thought them up or engineered them simply got things wrong, in this book Dr. Petroski widens his view to consider the larger context in which such failures occur. Sometimes devices fail because a good design is constructed with low quality materials incompetently applied. Or perhaps a design works so well it is adopted elsewhere again and again, with seemingly harmless improvements, until, suddenly, it does not work at all anymore.
Readers will encounter not only stories they have heard before, but some new stories and a moving discussion of the responsibility of the engineer to the public and the ways young engineers can be helped to grasp them.
"Success is success but that is all that it is," Dr. Petroski writes. It is failure that brings improvement.
28. What happened to the Golden Gate Bridge on its 50th birthday?
A. It carried more weight than it could.
B. It swayed violently in a strong wind
C. Its roadway was damaged by vehicles
D. Its access was blocked by many people.
29 Which of the following is Dr. Petroski's idea according to paragraph 3?
A. No design is well received everywhere
B. construction is more important than design.
C. Not all disasters are caused by engineering design
D. Improvements on engineering works are necessary.
30. What does the last paragraph suggest?
A. Failure can lead to progress.
B. Success results in overconfidence
C. Failure should be avoided.
D. Success comes from joint efforts.
31. What is the text?
A. A news report B. A short story.
C. A book review D. A research article.
答案解析：
28. A.根据第一段中的描述，工程师们注意到桥面正在下陷，因为它承受了前所未有的重负荷，这表明桥承载了超过其承受能力的重量。
29. C. 第三段中，Petroski博士提到设备失败有时是因为好的设计用低质量的材料不熟练地建造，或者是因为一个设计太好而被反复采用，直到突然不再有效。这表明并非所有的灾难都是由工程设计造成的。
30. A.最后一段中，Petroski博士写道“成功就是成功，但这就是全部”，然后指出是失败带来了改进。这表明失败可以导致进步。
31. C. 整篇文章讨论了Petroski博士的书《To Forgive Design：Understanding Failure》，包括书中的内容、观点和作者的意图，因此这是一篇书评。
