A Tribute to New York - Navarra

Pilar Santos Tambo A Tribute to New York
9 ( * + 9A
a) Why do people call New York “The Big Apple”? In the 1920s and 1930s, jazz
musicians all wanted to work in New York. “There are a lot of apples on the tree,”
they said, “but when you take New York City, you take The Big Apple!”
b) More than twenty million people visit New York every year.
c) The island of Manhattan is 21.5 kilometres long and 3.7 kilometres wide.
d) New York City has five boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and
Staten Island.
e) The city has 10,000 kilometres of streets and 780 square kilometres.
f) Four hundred years ago, Manhattan Island was the home of the Algonquin Indians.
g) In 1626, a Dutchman called Peter Minuit paid the Indians about 24 dollars for the
island.
h) By 1647, about 500 people lived in “New Amsterdam”.
i) In 1790, about 33,000 people lived in New York.
j) Today more than nine million people live there.
k) The Brooklyn Bridge opened on 24 May 1883.
l) In Manhattan the avenues go north and south and the streets go east and west. Most
of them have numbers for names.
m) New York cabs (taxis) are yellow and there are more than 11,000 of them.
n) Central Park extends from 59 th to 110 th Streets, between 5 th and 8 th Avenues.
o) The Statue of Liberty was a present from the French to the Americans in 1886 to
commemorate the first century of the American independence.
p) You can walk 354 stairs to get to the top of the statue.
q) New Yorkers say that you can buy everything you want in New York. “Macy’s”, on
Broadway and 34 th Street, is said to be the biggest shop in the world.
r) You can eat in New York every night for fifty years and never visit the same cafe or
restaurant twice.
s) In November of every year, 25,000 or more people run through all five boroughs in
the world famous New York Marathon.
47 From John Escott’s New York, Oxford Bookworms Factfiles.
81