After 75 Years This is the VOA Special English Technology
Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish
This
year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge in California.
It opened to vehicle traffic on May twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty-seven. Since
then, more than two billion vehicles have crossed the world-famous bridge
linking San Francisco and Marin County. The bridge is named after the Golden
Gate Strait. That narrow passage of water connects San Francisco Bay to the
Pacific Ocean. The Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension span in the
world at the time it was built. The suspended roadway stretches one thousand two
hundred eighty meters between the bridge's two tall towers. Today the Golden
gate still rates among the ten longest bridge spans. Mary Currie works for the
Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District. She says the bridge
represents one of the most extraordinary engineering projects of all time. She
calls it an "engineering marvel" and says it gets award after award for what it
means in civil engineering and structural engineering. She says the Golden Gate
Bridge is also a place where "things happen first." For example, it was the
first suspension bridge to have to change the roadway deck. The bridge is
twenty-seven meters wide and two thousand seven hundred eighty-eight meters
long. Two large cables pass over the top of the bridge's towers. These
structures stand two hundred twenty-seven meters above the water and one hundred
fifty-two meters above the road. Each cable holds more than twenty-seven
thousand five hundred strands of wire. Two hundred fifty pairs of vertical
suspender ropes connect the support cables to the suspension bridge. This is
part of what enables the bridge to move up and down by nearly five meters. The
project took four years to complete. Work began in nineteen thirty-three. The
Golden Gate Bridge weighed more than eight hundred thousand metric tons when it
was completed. The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper called it a thirty-five
million dollar steel harp. Joseph Strauss was the chief engineer of the Golden
Gate Bridge project. But architect Irving Morrow gets credit for its bright
orange color, known as International Orange. The Navy wanted the bridge painted
in yellow and black. The Air Force had suggested red and white. But Mary Currie
says Irving Morrow knew that orange would blend with the environment. It would
contrast with the ocean and the air above, "and it would also allow the art deco
styling to really stand out." For VOA Special English, I'm Carolyn Presutti.
(Adapted from a radio program broadcast 04Jun2012)
원문출처 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNc9x-FN7Ok&feature=youtube_gdata
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