Vocabulary

ballot – избирательный бюллетень

President-Elect – избранный, но ещё не вступивший в должность президент

the annual State of the Union message – ежегодное послание президента конгрессу о ситуации в стране

understudy – дублер

to negotiate – обсуждать условия

accusation – обвинение

UNIT 5

WASHINGTON, D. C. (I)

When the thirteen colonies became states and decided to join in a Union, there was much discussion about the capital. The decision finally arrived at was to carve out a hundred square miles from the States of Maryland and Virginia, call it Federal territory, and build a model capital on that site. It was only reasonable that the capital should bear the name of the General who had done so much to effect American Independence, and became its first President — Washington.

The hundred square miles are known as the District of Co­lumbia. This area is not a state, it belongs neither to the north nor to the south, but to all the states. The District is named in honour of Columbus, the discoverer of America. The terms Washington and the District of Columbia are practically synony­mous. The name of the capital always goes with the abbreviation D. C. not to be mixed with another Washington, one of the 50 US states.

The capital owes a great deal to George Washington. The President took an active part in selecting the area of the federal district, and decided that the city should be built on the north bank of the Potomac River. The capital was founded in 1791. George Washington called upon a famous French engineer, Pierre L'Enfant, one of the keen and sympathetic French supporters of the new republic of America. L'Enfant designed a city with the orderly street plan that has been followed to this day.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the new capital was called "Wilderness City" and the "City of Streets Without Houses". When the government moved there in 1800, President John Adams¹ and his party literally couldn't find the place, be­coming lost in the woods.

To the visitor, Washington appears most confusing, despite the master plan drawn by Pierre L'Enfant so long ago. The centre of the city is the Capitol Building. Four geographical sections, or quadrants, radiate out from the Capitol dividing the District of Columbia into North-East, North-West, South-East, South-West. The Capitol is also the point from which the city's streets are numbered or lettered. Round the Capitol a series of circles and squares occur at various intervals, and diagonal avenues radiate from these. From the Capitol to the Executive Mansion² runs broad Pennsylvania Avenue, about a mile and a half in length and flanked with trees. This is the avenue used for all those proces­sions and parades that make festive Washington so familiar a sight to television viewers.

All the diagonal avenues are named after the original thirteen American states, and the longest and straightest of them all is Massachusetts Avenue, which virtually cuts the city in half. But not every diagonal is an avenue, that is why despite the simple plan of numbered and lettered streets Washington at times con­fuses its sightseers.

Washington is not the largest city in the United States, for it cannot compare in size with cities like New York, Chicago, Phila­delphia, Detroit and Los Angeles, which have more than a million inhabitants. In 1985 its population was 626,000.

In the political sense, however, it is the centre of the republic and the most important city in the United States. Washington's only big business has always been the business of Government. It is said that some three-quarters of the adult population in Washington, D. C. are wholly or indirectly involved in the ad­ministrative machine and the general process of government: they are either politicians, or civil servants, or suppliers of goods and services to such people. In 1800, when the US government moved to Washington from Philadelphia, the Washington bureaucracy consisted of about 130 clerks, while in the 1980s government em­ployees in Washington numbered more than 300,000.

Power is what Washington is all about. It is power that at­tracts able men into government and politics and keeps them working ten hours or more a day, for far less money than they could make elsewhere. Thus, it is not an exaggeration that Washington is the greatest industrial town in the world, and its industry is politics.

Дата добавления: 2015-09-03