What Is a Port City? IELTS READING.

What Is a Port City? IELTS READING Answers

click Here to View Answers

Answers For What is a Port City.
27 ii
28 i
29 v
30 vi
31 D
32 C
33 F
34 G
35 NO
36 YES
37 NO
38 YES
39 NOT GIVEN
40 YES

READING PASSAGE 3

The port city provides a fascinating and rich understanding of the movement of people and goods around the world. We understand a port as a Centre of land-sea exchange and as a major source of livelihood and a major force for cultural mixing. But do ports all produce a range of common urban characteristics which justify classifying port cities together under a single generic label? Do they have enough in common to warrant distinguishing them from other kinds of cities?

A A port must be distinguished from a harbor. They are two very different things. Most ports have poor harbors, and many fine harbors see few ships. Harbor is a physical concept, a shelter for ships; the port is an economic concept, a center of land-sea exchange which requires good access to a hinterland even more than a sea-linked foreland. It is landward access, which is productive of goods for export and which demands imports, that is critical. Poor harbors can be improved with breakwaters and dredging if there is a demand fora port. Madras and Colombo are examples of harbors expensively improved by enlarging, dredging and building breakwaters.

B Port cities become industrial, financial, and service centers and political capitals because of their water connections and the urban concentration which arises there and later draws to its railways, highways, and air routes. Water transport means cheap access, the chief basis of all port cities. Many of the world’s biggest cities, for example, London, New York, Shanghai, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Jakarta, Calcutta, Philadelphia, and San Francisco began as ports – that is, with the land-sea exchange as their major function – but they have since grown disproportionately in other respects so that their port functions are no longer dominant. They remain different kinds of places from non-port cities and their port functions account for that difference.

C Port functions, more than anything else, make a city cosmopolitan. A port city is open to the world. In it races, cultures, and ideas, as well as goods from a variety of places, jostle, mix and enrich each other and the life of the city. The smell of the sea and the harbor, the sound of boat whistles, or the moving tides are symbols of their multiple links with a wide world, samples of which are present in microcosm within their own urban areas.

D Seaports have been transformed by the advent of powered vessels, whose size and draught have increased. Many formerly important ports have become economically and physically less accessible as a result. By-passed by most of their former enriching flow of exchange, they have become cultural and economic backwaters or have acquired the character of museums of the past. Examples of these are Charleston, Salem, Bristol, Plymouth, Surat Galle, Melaka, Soochow, and a long list of earlier prominent port cities in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

E Much domestic port trade has not been recorded. What evidence we have sug3ests that domestic trade was greater at all periods than external trade. Shanghai, for example, did most of its trade with other Chinese ports and inland cities. Calcutta traded mainly with other parts of India and so on. Most of any city’s population is engaged in providing goods and services for the city itself. Trade outside the city is its basic function. But each basic worker requires food, housing, clothing and other such services. Estimates of the ratio of basic to service workers range from 1:4 to 1:8.

F No city can be simply a port but must be involved in a variety of other activities. The port function of the city draws to its raw materials and distributes them in many other forms. Ports take advantage of the need for breaking up the bulk material where water and land transport meet and where loading and unloading costs can be minimized by refining raw materials or turning them into finished goods. The major examples here are oil refining and ore refining, which are commonly located at ports. It is not easy to draw a line around what is and is not a port function. All ports handle, unload, sort, alter, process, repack, and reship most of what they receive. A city may still be regarded as a port city when it becomes involved in a great range of functions not immediately involved with ships or docks.

G Cities which began as ports retain the chief commercial and administrative center of the city close to the waterfront. The center of New York is in lower Manhattan between two river mouths, the City of London is on the Thames, Shanghai along the Bund. This proximity to water is also true of Boston, Philadelphia, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Yokohama, where the commercial, financial, and administrative centers are still grouped around their harbors even though each city has expanded into a metropolis. Even a casual visitor cannot mistake them as anything but port cities.

IELTS READING SAMPLES

Question 27-30, What Is a Port City? IELTS READING

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 2 7-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 on the following pages.

Questions 27-30

Reading Passage 3 has seven paragraphs A-G.

From the list of headings below choose the most suitable headings for paragraphs B-E.

Write the appropriate numbers (i-viii) in boxes 27-30 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more headings than paragraphs, so you will not use them all.

List of Headings

i. A truly international environment
ii. Once a port city, always a port city
iii. Good ports make huge profits
iv. How the port changes a city’s
infrastructure
v. Reasons for the decline of ports
vi. Relative significance of trade and service industry
vii. Ports and harbors
viii. The demands of the oil industry

Example Answer

Paragraph A vii

27. Paragraph B
28. Paragraph C
29. Paragraph D
30. Paragraph E

Look at the following descriptions (Qucstions31 -34) of some port cities mentioned in Reading

Match the pairs of cities (A – H) listed below, with the descriptions.

Match the appropriate letters A-H in boxes 31-34 on your answer sheet.

NB There are more pairs of port cities than descriptions, so you will not use them all.

31. required considerable harbor development

32. began as ports but other facilities later dominated

33. lost their prominence when large ships could not be accommodated

34. maintain their business centers near the port waterfront