Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. （40 points）

Text 1

When Alexandre Gustave Eiffel completed the design and commenced construction of the tower in Paris which was to bear his name, a lot of loud protests were heard from nearly every quarter. Artists, writers, composers, and others publicly condemned the structure as monstrosity. Yet today, more than a hundred years later, virtually everyone proclaims the Eiffel Tower a work of genius and great beauty.

The idea of a 1,000-foot tower had been proposed for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. But it was the French who finally authorized such a structure for their Paris Exposition of 1889. When the design competition was concluded, the winning entry was one submitted by Eiffel, a builder of bridges who had been among the first to employ prefabricated and standardized structural parts to speed and simplify construction. Earlier in his career, he had solved the problem of how to support the Statue of Liberty by fastening the envelope of copper sheets with an interior framework of wrought iron.