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（英会話リスニングスクリプト）
About 40% of the world's population live
in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants.
Some of these cities, such as Canberra in
Australia, were carefully designed and are nice places to
live, but most cities grew spontaneously and without planning
- they have become overcrowded and polluted, and are unpleasant
places to live.
Although this is particularly true of cities
in developing countries, it is also true for cities in many
industrialized nations.
In Paris, the traffic jams are so bad that
it is often quicker to walk; in New York, it is quicker
to walk, but it is safer to go by cab - over 2,000 people
a year are murdered.
In Tokyo, people still leave their cars
unlocked, but the city is still uncivilized in other ways;
there are only a few parks, many roads have no sidewalks
and commuters often spend more than an hour each way on
trains.
If cities are so bad, why do people choose
to live in them?
The main reasons are jobs and higher incomes.
However, when you take into account the
cost of living, many city residents are no better off than
people living and working in the country.
This may explain why, in the West, many
cities have stopped growing.
However, this is not the case in the Third
World, where industry and commerce are concentrated in the
biggest cities, and often the rural unemployed have to choose
between moving to the city or starving.
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