Although the United States cherishes the tradition that it is a nation of small towns and wide open spaces，only one in every eight Americans now lives on a farm．The recent population trend has been a double one， toward both urbanization and suburbanization．Metropolitan areas have grown explosively in the past decade，and nearly half this increase has been in the suburbs．The rapid growth of cities has also brought rapid decentralization．The flight of Americans from the center city to the suburbs constitutes one of the GREatest migrations in modern times；quite residential sections outside cities have become conglomerations of streets， split-level houses，and shopping centers．
This spurt of suburban expansion，however，does not alter the basic fact that the United States has become one of the most urban nations on the face of the earth．Census Bureau figures show that the rural population has been shrinking steadily since 1830．When the United States became a nation it had no large cities at all；today some fifty cities have populations of more than 258，000．Mammoth complexes of cities are developing on the East Coast and the northeast central states，on the Pacific and Gulf coasts，and near the shores of the GREat Lakes．Some sociologists now regard the entire 600-mile stretch between Boston and Washington D．C．—an area holding a fifth of the country's population—as one vast city or，as they call it，megalopolis．
1．A traditional American belief is that _________．
A）few people live on farms
B）the nation consists mainly of small towns and wide open spaces
C）their population is the GREatest in the world
D）the United States is a nation of big cities
2．The selection describes the growth of metropolitan areas as _________．
A）leisurely B）erratic C）explosive D）gradual
3．Nearly half the increase in metropolitan population is accounted for by the _________．
A）growth of towns B）migration to farm areas
C）growth of the suburbs D）expansion of existing urban areas
4．The author implies that the modern suburb is _________．
A）quiet and residential B）very rural in character
C）confused and overgrown D）much like a small town
5．One aspect of the recent population trend is the _________．
A）development of complexes of cities
B）increasingly GREat distance between cities
C）transformation of cities into suburbs
D）growth of many small towns
6．Put the two underlined sentences in the passage into Chinese．
参考答案：BCCCA
翻译：
1）最近人口聚居呈双重趋势，既趋向城市化，又趋向郊区化。
2）有些社会学家现在把从波斯顿到华盛顿特区的一整片绵延 600英里、拥有美国五分之一人口的地区看作一个巨大的城市，他们称之为特大城市。
