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PART Ⅰ LISTENING COMPREHENSION?

SECTION A TALK

The first area in American urban history extended from the early 17th cent ury to about 1840. Throughout those years the total urban population remained sm all and so with the cities. At the first federal census in 1790, city dwellers made up nearly 5.1% of the total population and only two places had more than 25 ,000 inhabitants. Fifty years later only 10.8% of the national population fell i nto the urban category and only one city, New York, contained more than 250,000 people. Largely because of the unsophisticated modes of transportation, even the  more populous places in the early 19th century remained small enough that peop le could easily walk from one end of the city to the other in those days.

Though smaller in modern standards these walking cities, as it were, perfor med a variety of functions in those days. One was economic. Throughout the pre-mod ern era, this part of urban life remained so overwhelmingly commercial that almo st every city owed its development to trade. Yet city dwellers concerned themsel ves not only with promoting agricultural activities in their own areas, they als o collected and processed goods from these areas and distributed them to other c ities. From the beginning line and increasingly in the 18th and early 19th centu ries, cities served as centres of both commerce and simple manufacturing.

Apart from the economical functions, the early cities also had important no n-economic functions to play. Since libraries, museums, schools and colleges wer e built and needed people to go there to visit or to study, cities and the large early towns with their concentration of population tended to serve as centres o feducational activities and as places from which information was spread to th e countryside. In addition, the town with people of different occupational, ethn ic, racial and religious affiliations became focuses of formal and informal organi zations which were set up to foster the security and to promote the interests an d influence of each group. In those days the pre-industrial city in America func tioned as a complex and varied organizing element in American life, not as a sim ple, heterogeneous and sturdy union.

The variety of these early cities was reinforced by the nature of their loc ation and by the process of town spreading. Throughout the pre-industrial period of American history, the city occupied sites on the eastern portion of the the largely under-developed continent, and settlement on the countryside generally followed the expansion of towns in that region. The various interest groups in e ach city tended to compete with their counterparts in other cities for economic, social and political control first nearby and later more distant and larger are as. And always there remained the underdeveloped regions to be developed through the establishment of new towns by individuals and groups. These individuals and groups sought economic opportunities or looked for a better social, political o r religious atmosphere. In this sense, the cities better developed a succession of urban frontiers. While this kind of circumstance made Americans one o f the most prolific and self-conscious city-building peoples of their time, it d id not retard the steadily urbanizing society in the sense that decade by decade an ever larger proportion of the people lived in cities.

In 1680 an estimated 9 to 10 percent of American colonists lived in urban s ettlements. A century later, that was the end of the 18th century, though 24 pla ces had 2500 persons or more, city dwellers accounted for only 5.1% of the total population. For the next thirty years, the proportion remained relatively stabl e and it was not until 1830 that the urban figure moved back up to the level of 1690.

In short, as the number of cities increased after 1680, they sent large num bers of people into the countryside and their ratainers. Nonetheless the continuous  movement of people into and out of the cities made life in the many but relativ ely small places lively and stimulating.