Unit 16.

Towns and cities

1.Our old -town is a maze of narrow cobbled streets lined (built up) with quaint
houses, where one may also find a couple [why only a couple? May be it’s better
to say ‘several’, or ‘a number of’?] of pavement cafés, though the area is mostly
calm with relaxed atmosphere and no noisy bars, overpriced restaurants and or
upmarket shops.
2.There is so much hustle and bustle in the streets of the city centre, where all the
lively bars and fashionable clubs are located. [If you say ‘so’, normally one
expects that it will be followed by ‘that…’]
3.The industrial zone of the city is an urban wasteland with sprawling factory
buildings, exhaust fumes and the incessant roar of a steel mill. [an industrial area,
with fully functioning factories can hardly be described as ‘an urban wasteland’ –
see the footnote on p. 36 explaining the collocation].
4.Brazilian slums, or favelas, are well-known worldwide as no-go areas, where the
police and other authorities are afraid to enter. [foreign words are normally
italicized]
5.The main avenue of the city is very busy and has a bumper-to-bumper traffic all
day long.
6.Housing prices in the city centre are for the most part excessively high, so regular
people prefer to reside in the comfortable suburbs.
7. A new government provides hundreds of distant villages in deprived areas with
access to free distance- learning education at all levels. [when two or more
nouns or an adjective+noun serve as an attribute to another noun, they are usually
hyphenated to prevent syntactic ambiguity]