3. Match the building with the year of its creation:

The Chrysler Building Home Insurance Building The Flaxmill Manchester Town Hall Wainwright Building The Boerentoren The Empire State Building The Shell Mex House The Torre Piacentini The American Surety Building

1932 1940 1930 1895 1797 1931 1877 1891 1884–1885 1886

4. Make questions for these answers:

1. Steel, glass, reinforced concrete and granite.

2. The Great Pyramid of Giza in ancient Egypt.

3. Due to the restricted land area available for development.

4. The architect Major William Le Baron Jenney.

5. The American Surety Building.

6. The Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.

7. In Latin America and in Asia.

8. From the late 1950s and early 1960s.

9. Chicago, Hong Kong, and New York City.

10. Shanghai, Dubai, and Miami.

Follow-up

5. Look at the Top-5 of the tallest buildings in the world. Have you known all these names before? What other famous skyscrapers do you know? Choose any of them to describe. Use additional information.

Building	City	Height	Floors	Built
Burj Khalifa	Dubai, UAE	828 m	162	2010
Taipei 101	Taipei, Taiwan	508 m	101	2004
World Financial Center	Shanghai, China	492 m	101	2008
International Commerce Center	Hong Kong, China	484 m	118	2010
Petronas Twin Towers	Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia	452 m	88	1998

6. Look through some additional information about skyscrapers.

Give the main points using the following phrases:

Sustainability

The skyscraper as a concept is a product of the industrialized age, made possible by cheap energy and raw materials. The amount of steel, concrete and glass needed to construct a skyscraper is vast, and these materials represent a great deal of embodied energy.

Tall skyscrapers are very heavy, which means that they must be built on a sturdier foundation than would be required for shorter, lighter buildings. Building materials must also be lifted to the top of a skyscraper during construction, requiring more energy than would be necessary at lower heights.

Furthermore, a skyscraper consumes a lot of electricity because potable and non-potable water must be pumped to the highest occupied floors, skyscrapers are usually designed to be mechanically ventilated, elevators are generally used instead of stairs, and natural lighting cannot be utilized in rooms far from the windows and the windowless spaces such as elevators, bathrooms and stairwells.

D espite these costs, the size of skyscrapers allows for high-density work and living spaces, reducing the amount of land given over to human development. Mass transit and commercial transport are economically and environmentally more efficient when serving high-density development than suburban or rural development.

Also, the total energy expended towards waste disposal and climate control is relatively lower for a given number of people occupying a skyscraper than that same number of people occupying modern housing.

Reading task B