2020年新高考Ⅱ卷（海南） Passage C

InMay 1987 the Golden Gate Bridge had a 50th birthday party. The bridge wasclosed to motor traffic so people could enjoy a walk across it. Organizersexpected perhaps 50,000 people to show up. Instead, as many as 800, 000 crowdedthe roads to the bridge. By the time 250,000 were on the bridge, engineersnoticed something terrible：the roadway was flattening under what turned outto be the heaviest load it had ever been asked to carry. Worse, it wasbeginning to sway(晃动). The authorities closed access to the bridgeand tens of thousands of people made their way back to land. A disaster was avoided.

Thestory is one of scores in To Forgive Design：Understanding Failure, abook that is at once a love letter to engineering and a paean(赞歌)to its breakdowns. Its author, Dr. Henry Petroski, has long beenwriting about disasters. In this book, he includes the loss of the spaceshuttles(航天飞机)Challenger and Columbia, and the sinking of theTitanic.

Thoughhe acknowledges that engineering works can fail because the person who thoughtthem up or engineered them simply got things wrong, in this book Dr. Petroskiwidens his view to consider the larger context in which such failures occur. Sometimes devices fail because a good design is constructed with low qualitymaterials incompetently applied. Or perhaps a design works so well it isadopted elsewhere again and again, with seemingly harmless improvements, until, suddenly, it does not work at all anymore.

Readerswill encounter not only stories they have heard before, but some new storiesand a moving discussion of the responsibility of the engineer to the public andthe ways young engineers can be helped to grasp them.

“Successis success but that is all that it is,” Dr. Petroski writes. It is failure thatbrings improvement.