IV. Reading Comprehension
24-26 題為一題組
    When Gaudi died suddenly at the age of 73, struck down by a tram on a busy Barcelona street in 1926, the architect had been working on the Templo Expiatorio de la Sagrada Familia for 43 years. A religious organization hired the diocesan architect, Francisco de Paula del Villar, to build what was originally planned as a typical neo-Gothic church. But when Villar resigned a year after construction began, the project passed to Gaudi. Although he would go on to build several of Barcelona’s most iconic structures, including La Pedrera and Parc Guell, at the time, he had little more than a few lampposts and a shrine to his name.
    It didn’t take him long, however, to transform the Sagrada Familia’s original plans into an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking: a structure that would combine natural forms and Christian symbolism into a temple that, as Fauli (the head architect now charged with the task of completing the church) puts it, “expressed meaning not only through the sculpture and other decorations but through the architecture itself.” Gaudi was not a practicing Catholic when he received the assignment. But he became increasingly devout as he worked on it, eventually coming to see the very structure as a vehicle for Christian evangelism.
    “My client,” Gaudi reportedly said, “is not in a hurry.” Aware that the Sagrada Familia would never be finished in his lifetime, he left extensive drawings and models for a building that, when complete, would fill an entire city block. He insisted on completing the Nativity entrance—even though there was not yet a nave to enter into—because he knew it would serve as a kind of inspirational advert for what was
to come. He did not quite achieve the goal: that façade would not be finished until 1936. Otherwise, only the crypt, the apse’s façade and a single tower were complete at the time of his death. Everything else, including the remaining 17 towers and the central nave, remained undone.
    For a long time, it stayed that way. During Spain’s 1936-39 civil war, construction stopped, and much of Gaudi’s preparatory work was destroyed. Even once it resumed, that were long stretches from the 1940s through the 1990s when insufficient funds—construction depended entirely on private donations—slowed or halted altogether the work. When Fauli joined the team as a junior architect in 1990, only three of the interior’s 56 columns and a handful of the windows had been completed.
    But that was before the miracle of modern tourism. Although many in Barcelona would eventually see them as a curse, the millions of travelers who began flooding the city at the start of the new century meant salvation for the Sagrada Familia. As the number of visitors rose— the church currently gets roughly 4 million per year, and each one pays an entry fee that ranges from $16 to $43—the foundation overseeing the basilica found itself in the unfamiliar position of having enough money to finish the main nave. A soaring expanse with treelike pillars and multicolored stained-glass windows that make it feel like kaleidoscopic forest, the nave was consecrated by Pope Benedict in 2010.
【題組】24. According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?
(A) Gaudi was trusted with the mission because he was an architect of great reputation and piety toward God.
(B) The booming tourism industry in Barcelona made it possible to resume the construction of the Sagrada Familia.
(C) Gaudi had no regrets because he saw the completion of the Nativity entrance before he died.
(D) After the originally assigned architect died suddenly in a tram accident, Gaudi took over the job.