Step by Step 3000 第3册 Unit10:Oil reserves and Parking places(2)

B. keywords.

headache, parking laws, parking meters, car elevators, mass transit.
Vocabulary.

migraine, infraction, enlist, diabolical, carousel.
B1. You're going to hear an interview with a reporter who works for the Washington Post from Tokyo, supply the missing words while listening.
In many American cities finding a place to park your car can be a headache, in Tokyo it's more like a migraine.
Parking is forbidden on 95 percent of Tokyo's streets and because landowners can make a lot more money by building apartments or office building, the city has few parking garages.
Not surprisingly, most drivers park their cars illegally. The government has decided to fight back.
Under the city's new parking laws, the maximum fine for leaving a car parked illegally overnight is 1400 dollars. The cheapest fine for parking in fraction runs about 75 dollars.
T.R Reid reports for the Washington Post from Tokyo. He says the city's traffic cops have even enlisted the help of new high-tech parking meters.
They yell at the cop. When your time expires, red light blink just to make sure that the parking cops gets over there quickly.
They have electric eyes, that's what I think is really diabolical.
They have electric eyes. They see your car the minute it pulls in, so the idea of sitting at the meter for a while and doing some work you can't do that because your sixty minutes is already ticking away.
The meter is smart enough is know if your car has had its allowed sixty minutes, so you can't feed the meter and buy another hour.
And it keeps ticking after your time is up so that it tells the cop how long you've been there.
And the longer you've been parked illegally, the higher your ticket.
Is there... I mean...I guess people must be then developing real innovative ways to park their cars.
There are some really remarkable devices designed to fit more than one car into one parking place: car elevators, car carousels.
And these, of course, people...these are businesses. People don't bring them with them, do they?
No, no, no, you can buy a car elevator for your house, and what they do is they dig down under the one that...the tiny little postage stamp where you're allowed to park your car outside your house, and so there is two level and then just an elevator, and you can keep two cars in where you used to have only space for one.
Ahh. You can buy this for a private home.
You can buy a three-level elevator for your home if you've got three cars in the house.
I've always understood that mass transit in Tokyo, and the rest of Japan, for that matter, is great. Why is anybody buying a car living in Tokyo.
Exactly, I agree all the way. You can get anywhere you want in this town.
The reason is people can afford it now. It's a new idea. They have the money, and you gotta do something with this money, and you've already taken several trips to Hawaii. You can't quite afford to buy a house yet, so buying a car is the thing to do.
This car boom, in fact, I gather there's a name for it even.
Myca, Myca. It's the English phrase"my car".
Well, it's a pretty big irony that the world's premier automaker is the absolute worst place, in fact, an impossible place to have a car.
Exactly. And one of the things the Japanese auto industry has been doing, has been trying to build up their domestic market, and they've done it with brilliant success. Of course, they had an incredibly prosperous economy.
Now the problem is there's no place for these cars.