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课时作业39 Pygmalion Ⅰ.阅读理解 Right in front of the Minneapolis Central Library, a row of green bikes sits parked in a special stand. Each bike is designed with the logo “Nice Ride”——the name of the city's bikeshare program. Nice Ride bikes are a lot like the library books that people come here to borrow. To rent a bike, you simply use your membership card at a Nice Ride bike station. Members can rent one of 1,200 bikes from 138 stations throughout Minnesota's largest city. People use the Nice Ride bikes to go to work, to go out on business, or just to enjoy the city's many bike paths. The rise of bikeshare programs like Nice Ride is encouraging more people than ever to choose biking over driving. Skyrocketing gas prices and concerns about the environment have also gotten people to dust off their bike helmets, pump air into flat tires, and hit the road. Why ride? Not only is biking good exercise, but switching from a car to a bike also reduces the amount of pollution in the air. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change, is one of the many polluting substances that come out of a car's tailpipe. Bikeshare systems are found around the world in cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, Australia. The largest program—with 70,000 bikes—is in Wuhan, China. To make roads friendlier to nonmotorists, the U．S. Department of Transportation has invested more than a billion dollars in cycling and pedestrian projects in recent years. The money went toward building thousands of miles of onstreet bike lanes and bike—and pedestrian—only passages called greenways. | 
