Read the passage and answer the following questions
ইংরেজি
স্বপন হালদার, প্রভাষক
নটর ডেম কলেজ, ঢাকা
Read the passage and answer the following questions ( A-C):
I’m sitting in the back of a CNG, a three-wheeled motorcycle shaped like a slice of. pie and covered with scrap metal. I’m here working on a human rights project, but whenever I ask people in Dhaka what they think inteational organizations should really be working on, they tell me about the traffic. Alleviating traffic congestion is one of the major development challenges of our time. Half the world’s population already lives in cities, and the United Nations (UN) estimates that the proportion will rise to nearly 70 percent by 2050. Dhaka, the world’s densest and fastest growing city, is a case study in how this problem got so bad and why it’s so difficult to solve.
Dhaka’s infrastructure doesn’t match the scale of its population. Just 7 percent of the city is covered by roads, compared with around 25 percent of Paris and Vienna. Dhaka also suffers from the absence of a planned road network.. There are 650 major intersections, but only 60 traffic lights, many of which don’t work. That means the police force isn’t enforcing driving or parking rules; they’re in the intersections, directing traffic.
The cost of Dhaka’s traffic congestion is estimated at $3.8 billion a year, and that’s just the delays and air pollution, not the less-tangible losses in quality of life. Paradoxically, the poor infrastructure is one of the reasons why the city is growing so fast. Without roads or trains to whisk them to the suburbs, Dhaka residents have no choice but to crowd into the middle, set up slums between high-rises, and walk .to work.
Then there are the users of the roads. Besides pedestrians, the narrow lanes are shared by bicycles, rickshaws, scooters, motorcycles, CNGs, buses, and cars. All these modes take up a different amount of space and have different top speeds. Most people you talk to in Bangladesh blame the traffic jams on the rickshaws. There are too many of them, they say, and they drive so slowly that they trap the cars, buses, and CNGs behind them. The govement is under pressure to designate some lanes as car-only, to build wider roads and overpasses, to take the slow traffic out from in front of the fast.
And this brings us to the third reason why the traffic problem is so difficult to solve. All of these fixes sound easy and obvious, but they come at a cost. One and a half million people drive rickshaws for a living, plus another few hundred thousand own and repair them. Govement efforts to get people out of rickshaws and into buses and trains are going to attract huge opposition.
Even increasing bus capacity is more complicated than it sounds. A 2009 World Bank analysis found 60 separate bus companies in Dhaka. Since the bus companies compete with one another, the drivers have every incentive to drive aggressively and take more passengers than the buses can hold. What’s more, the public transport isn’t all that public. Many of the bus companies are owned or linked to political parties or powerful trade unions. Govement efforts to unify or regularize the system would amount to a hostile takeover of all of these small companies.
What does the word “retain” mean?
What does the word “designate” mean?
a)design b) choose c) pertain d) phony
What does the word “alleviate” mean?
What does the word “invariably” mean?
What does the word “paradox ” mean?
C: Write down the difference between the words:
Road and street, avenue and highway, town and suburb
