Question

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

In the last third of the nineteenth century a new housing form was quitely being developed. In 1869 the Stuyvesant, considered New York’s first apartment house was built on East Eighteenth Street. The building was financed by the developer Rutherfurd Stuyvesant and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Each man had lived in Paris, and each understood the eonomics and social potential of this Parisian housing form. But the Stuyvesant was at best a limited success. In spite of Hunt’s inviting façade, the living space was awkwardly arranged. Those who could afford them were quite content to remain in the more sumptous, single-family homes, leaving the Stuyvesant to newly married couples and bachelors.

The fundamental problem with the Stuyvesant and the other early apartment buildings that quickly followed, in the 1870’s and early 1880’s was that they were confined to the typical New York building lot. That lot was a rectangular area 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep-a shape perfectly suited for a row house. The lot could also accommodate a rectangular tenement, though it could not yield the square, well-lighted, and logically arranged rooms that great apartment buildings require. But even with the awkward interior configurations of the early apartment buildings, the idea caught on. It met the needs of a large and growing population that wanted something better then tenements but could not afford or did not want row houses.

So while the city’s newly emerging social leadership commissioned their mansions, apartment houses and hotels began to sprout in multiple lots, thus breaking the initial space constraints. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, large apartment houses began dotting the developed portions of New York City, and by the opening decades of the twentieth century, spacious buildings, such as the Dakota and the Ansonia finally transcended the tight confinement of row house building lots. From there it was only a small step to building luxury apartment houses on the newly created Park Avenue, right next to the fashionable Fifth Avenue shopping area.

The author mentions the Dakota and the Ansonia in bold because _______.

A. they are examples of large, well-designed apartment buildings

B. their design is similar to that of row houses

C. they were built on a single building lot

D. they are famous hotels

Answer 1

Đáp án A.

Keywords: Dakota and the Ansonia.

Clue: “… spacious buildings, such as the Dakota and the Ansonia finally … only a small step to building luxury apartment houses.”: … những tòa nhà rộng rãi, như là “Dakota and the Ansonia” cuối cùng cũng vượt ra khỏi sự kìm hãm của những tòa nhà liên kết. Từ đây thì chỉ một bước nhỏ nữa thôi là có thể xây dựng những căn hộ lộng lẫy.

Như vậy “Dakota and the Ansonia” là ví dụ của những căn hộ cao cấp rộng lớn, thiết kế đẹp nên đáp án là A. they are examples of large, well-designed apartment buildings.