2018年AP英语语言简答题真题+答案+PDF下载

2018年AP英语语言简答题真题+答案+PDF下载

Source A

United States Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division. “History of the Federal Use of Eminent Domain.” The United States Department of Justice, 15 May 2015, www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminentdomain.

The following is excerpted from an overview of eminent domain published on a federal Web site.

The federal government’s power of eminent domain has long been used in the United States to acquire property for public use. Eminent domain “appertains to every independent government. It requires no constitutional recognition; it is an attribute of sovereignty.” Boom Co. v. Patterson, 98 U.S. 403, 406 (1879). However, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stipulates: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Thus, whenever the United States acquires a property through eminent domain, it has a constitutional responsibility to justly compensate the property owner for the fair market value of the property. . . .

The U.S. Supreme Court first examined federal eminent domain power in 1876 in Kohl v. United States. This case presented a landowner’s challenge to the power of the United States to condemn land in Cincinnati, Ohio for use as a custom house and post office building. Justice William Strong called the authority of the federal government to appropriate property for public uses “essential to its independent existence and perpetuity.” Kohl v. United States, 91 U.S. 367, 371 (1875).

The Supreme Court again acknowledged the existence of condemnation authority twenty years later in United States v. Gettysburg Electric Railroad Company. Congress wanted to acquire land to preserve the site of the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania. The railroad company that owned some of the property in question contested this action. Ultimately, the Court opined that the federal government has the power to condemn property “whenever it is necessary or appropriate to use the land in the execution of any of the powers granted to it by the constitution.” United States v. Gettysburg Electric Ry., 160 U.S. 668, 679 (1896).

Eminent domain has been utilized traditionally to facilitate transportation, supply water, construct public buildings, and aid in defense readiness. Early federal cases condemned property for construction of public buildings . . . and aqueducts to provide cities with drinking water . . . for maintenance of navigable waters . . . and for the production of war materials. . . . The Land Acquisition Section and its earlier iterations represented the United States in these cases, thereby playing a central role in early United States infrastructure projects.

Condemnation cases like that against the Gettysburg Railroad Company exemplify another use for eminent domain: establishing parks and setting aside open space for future generations, preserving places of historic interest and remarkable natural beauty, and protecting environmentally sensitive areas. Some of the earliest federal government acquisitions for parkland were made at the end of the nineteenth century and remain among the most beloved and well-used of American parks. In Washington, D.C., Congress authorized the creation of a park along Rock Creek in 1890 for the enjoyment of the capitol city’s residents and visitors. The Department of Justice became involved when a number of landowners from whom property was to be acquired disputed the constitutionality of the condemnation. In Shoemaker v. United States, 147 U.S. 282 (1893), the Supreme Court affirmed the actions of Congress.

Today, Rock Creek National Park, over a century old and more than twice the size of New York City’s Central Park, remains a unique wilderness in the midst of an urban environment. This is merely one small example of the many federal parks, preserves, historic sites, and monuments to which the work of the Land Acquisition Section has contributed.

Source B

Carney, Timothy P. “Eminent Domain Often Leaves Broken Communities Behind.” Washington Examiner, 29 March 2014, www.washingtonexaminer.com/eminentdomain-often-leaves-broken-communitiesbehind/article/2546500.

The following is an excerpt from an editorial published in a Washington, D.C., newspaper.

Weeds and rubble cover 90 acres along Long Island Sound. A room with cinder-block walls sits locked in an empty Brooklyn basement. And a gleaming industrial palace has failed to bring jobs to the banks of Ohio’s Mahoning River.

These are monuments to failed central planning. Eminent domain, state and local subsidies, and federal-corporate partnerships have yielded these lifeless fruits, failing to deliver the rebirth, community benefits and jobs they promise — but succeeding in delivering profits to the companies that lobby for them.

The economic philosophy at work here isn’t capitalism or socialism. It’s corporatism: the belief that government and business should work together. You could describe corporatism as the view that profits provided by the market aren’t sufficient motivation for business, so government must put some icing on top. From another perspective, corporatism is government’s attempt to harness the profit motive for the goals of policymakers: let industry row the ship while politicians steer.

Often, the corporatist ship founders on the rocks of false promises.

Last decade, the New London Development Corporation — a quasi governmental body —crafted a plan for revitalizing the small Connecticut town. This plan involved a new Pfizer plant. The NLDC and local politicians sold the land to Pfizer for $10, gave the company tax breaks and pledged $26 million to clean up contamination and a local junkyard.

“Pfizer wants a nice place to operate,” the Hartford Courant quoted executive David Burnett as saying in 2001. But Burnett wasn’t just talking about the junkyard and the contamination. He was also talking about the area’s middleclass homes. “We don’t want to be surrounded by tenements.”

So NLDC drove out the homeowners, using eminent domain. Homeowner Suzette Kelo sued, but in the end, the liberal majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the developers and the politicians. The majority argued: “The city has carefully formulated a development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue.”

The New York Times applauded the ruling: “New London’s development plan may hurt a few small property owners, who will, in any case, be fully compensated. But many more residents are likely to benefit if the city can shore up its tax base and attract badly needed jobs.”

In 2009, Pfizer, after its merger with Wyeth, abandoned its plant in New London. The condemned neighborhood is now, as Charlotte Allen put it in the Weekly Standard, a “vast, empty field— 90 acres — that was entirely uninhabited and looked as though it had always been that way.” On the bright side, Pfizer got to sell the plant to General Dynamics for $55 million.

2018年AP英语语言简答题真题余下省略！