Text 4
America is the land of the automobile. This country has only 6 percent of the world’s population but 46 percent of the world’s cars. Right now, there are 97 million privately owned cars consuming ’75 billion gallons of gasoline and traveling an estimated 1,000 billion miles, a year. The figures also affirm something we know every time we refill our gasoline tank. The automobile is a very thirsty piece of technology. Of the total petroleum supply in the United States, 30 percent goes to quench that thirst. Every year for each passenger car, about 800 gallons of gasoline are consumed.
Other aspects of our commitment to the automobile also bear mentioning here, it takes a great deal of energy to manufacture one automobile--about 150 million BTUs of energy. This is equivalent to 1,200 gallons of gasoline, enough to run a car for about 16,000 miles. We expend energy in the process of shipping cars from factories to showrooms, displaying them for sale hand making replacement parts for repairs. One out of six jobs in the nation is associated with the automobile business. About two gallons of gasoline are consumed in the process of making every ten gallons that are pumped into an automobile’s gas tank.
Building highways and parking lots has used up much of our land. It has been estimated that we have paved over 21,000 square miles of this country’s surface, most of it to accommodate the automobile. The automobile is also the largest contributor to our nation’s air pollution problem and a very serious one because most of its pollutants are emitted in our large metropolitan areas.
Aside from the great impact that would occur if everyone seriously practised conservation, one should stop and think about his own casual use of the automobile. There are numerous situations where better planning and awareness could really make a difference in energy savings and dollars. Because the automobile uses the largest percentage of energy in an average American family’s energy budget and almost half of the dollars, the impetus for savings is tremendous.

Most people do not realize that（）

A:the manufacture of the automobile requires much energy B:gasoline is more expensive than home heating oil C:automobile speed lowers energy efficiency D:oil resources could someday run out

Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon and the planting there of a wrinkled flag can rival the construction of Panama Canal as an epoch-making accomplishment. The Suez Canal, the trans-Siberian Railroad and the Taj Mahal all pale beside it. The canal’s construction is more closely akin to the pyramids of Egypt in its scope and difficulty of execution, but in the modern era, there is only the moon.
Like the landing on the moon, the construction of a canal across the narrow Isthmus of Panama was a dream long before it became reality. As early as 1534, Charles I of Spain proposed a canal at Panama, but it would take nearly 400 years for builders to catch up with his imagination.
When the canal finally was proposed required all the creativity the twentieth century could muster. It was the largest public work ever attempted. Its engineers had to control a wild river, cut the continental divide, construct the largest dam and man made lake known to that date and swing the largest locks ever constructed from the biggest cement structures then poured. Along the way, two of the world’s most devastating diseases had to be wiped out in one of their greatest strongholds. And all of this was to be done without the airplane or the automobile: Kitty Hawk rose into the head-lines in 1903——the same year the U. S. signed a treaty with Panama——and there was no read across the isthmus until the World War Ⅱ.
If Panama has had an unusual role in bygone dreams, it most certainly has a startling relationship to the hard facts of geography. The country is farther east than most people imagine——the canal and about half of Panama actually lie east of Miami. Because of the country’s shallow "S" shape and east-west orientation, it has places where the sun rises in the Pacific and sets in the Atlantic. More significantly, Panama is squeezed into the narrowest portion of Central. At the canal, just 43 miles of land separate Atlantic and Pacific shores. Perhaps even more important, Panama offers the lowest point in the North American continental divide——originally 312 feet above sea level at the canal’s Culebra Cut. By comparison, the lowest pass in the United States is nearly 5,000 feet.

The canal was built with the help of （）

A:the airplane B:the automobile C:both the plane and the automobile D:neither the plane nor the automobile

Passage Two
Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon and the planting there of a wrinkled flag can rival the construction of Panama Canal as an epoch-making accomplishment. The Suez Canal, the trans-Siberian Railroad and the Taj Mahal all pale beside it. The canal’s construction is more closely akin to the pyramids of Egypt in its scope and difficulty of execution, but in the modern era, there is only the moon.
Like the landing on the moon, the construction of a canal across the narrow Isthmus of Panama was a dream long before it became reality. As early as 1534, Charles I of Spain proposed a canal at Panama, but it would take nearly 400 years for builders to catch up with his imagination.
When the canal finally was proposed required all the creativity the twentieth century could muster. It was the largest public work ever attempted. Its engineers had to control a wild river, cut the continental divide, construct the largest dam and man made lake known to that date and swing the largest locks ever constructed from the biggest cement structures then poured. Along the way, two of the world’s most devastating diseases had to be wiped out in one of their greatest strongholds. And all of this was to be done without the airplane or the automobile: Kitty Hawk rose into the head-lines in 1903 the same year the U. S. signed a treaty with Panama——and there was no road across the isthmus until the World War Ⅱ.
If Panama has had an unusual role in bygone dreams, it most certainly has a startling relationship to the hard facts of geography. The country is farther east than most people imagine——the canal and about half of Panama actually lie east of Miami. Because of the country’s shallow "S" shape and east-west orientation, it has places where the sun rises in the Pacific and sets in the Atlantic. More significantly, Panama is squeezed into the narrowest portion of Central. At the canal, just 43 miles of land separate Atlantic and Pacific shores. Perhaps even more important, Panama offers the lowest point in the North American continental divide—— originally 312 feet above sea level at the canal’s Culebra Cut. By comparison, the lowest pass in the United States is nearly 5,000 feet.

The canal was built with the help of （）

A:the airplane B:the automobile C:both the plane and the automobile D:neither the plane nor the automobile

Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon and the planting there of a wrinkled flag can rival the construction of Panama Canal as an epoch-making accomplishment. The Suez Canal, the trans-Siberian Railroad and the Taj Mahal all pale beside it. The canal’s construction is more closely akin to the pyramids of Egypt in its scope and difficulty of execution, but in the modern era, there is only the moon.
Like the landing on the moon, the construction of a canal across the narrow Isthmus of Panama was a dream long before it became reality. As early as 1534, Charles I of Spain proposed a canal at Panama, but it would take nearly 400 years for builders to catch up with his imagination.
When the canal finally was proposed required all the creativity the twentieth century could muster. It was the largest public work ever attempted. Its engineers had to control a wild river, cut the continental divide, construct the largest dam and man made lake known to that date and swing the largest locks ever constructed from the biggest cement structures then poured. Along the way, two of the world’s most devastating diseases had to be wiped out in one of their greatest strongholds. And all of this was to be done without the airplane or the automobile: Kitty Hawk rose into the head-lines in 1903——the same year the U. S. signed a treaty with Panama——and there was no read across the isthmus until the World War Ⅱ.
If Panama has had an unusual role in bygone dreams, it most certainly has a startling relationship to the hard facts of geography. The country is farther east than most people imagine——the canal and about half of Panama actually lie east of Miami. Because of the country’s shallow "S" shape and east-west orientation, it has places where the sun rises in the Pacific and sets in the Atlantic. More significantly, Panama is squeezed into the narrowest portion of Central. At the canal, just 43 miles of land separate Atlantic and Pacific shores. Perhaps even more important, Panama offers the lowest point in the North American continental divide——originally 312 feet above sea level at the canal’s Culebra Cut. By comparison, the lowest pass in the United States is nearly 5,000 feet.
The canal was built with the help of ______.

A:the airplane B:the automobile C:both the plane and the automobile D:neither the plane nor the automobile

Passage Two

The canal was built with the help of ______.

A:the airplane B:the automobile C:both the plane and the automobile D:neither the plane nor the automobile

When it comes to singling out those who have made a difference in all our lives,you cannot overlook Henry Ford. A historian a century from now might well conclude that it was Ford who most influenced all manufacturing, everywhere, even to this day, by introducing a new way to make cars--one, strange to say, that originated in slaughterhouses.
Back in the early 1900’s,slaughterhouses used what could have been called a "disassembly line. "Ford reversed this process to see if it would speed up production of a part of an automobile engine called a magneto. Rather than have each worker completely assemble a magneto, one of its elements was placed on a conveyer, and each worker, as it passed, added another component to it, the same one each time. Professor David of the University of Delaware, an expert on industrial development ,tells what happened:
"The previous day,workers carrying out the entire process had averaged one assembly every 20 minutes. But on that day,on the line,the assembly team averaged one every 13 minutes and 10 seconds per person. "
Within a year,the time had been reduced to five minutes. In 1913,Ford went all the way. Hooked together by ropes, partially assembled vehicles were towed past workers who completed them on piece at a time. It wasn’t long before Ford was turning out several hundred thousand cars a year,a remarkable achievement then. And so efficient and economical was this new system that he cup the price of his cars in half,to $ 260,putting them within reach of all those who, up until that time, could not afford them. Soon, auto makers the world over copied him. In fact, he encouraged them to do so by writing a book about all of his innovations, entitled Today and Tomorrow. The Age of the Automobile has arrived. Today, aided by robots and other forms of automation,everything from toasters to perfumes are made on assembly lines.
A magneto is a technical term for______

A:an automobile B:an engine C:a part of an automobile engine D:an automobile engine

? ?When it comes to singling out those who have made a difference in all our lives,you cannot overlook Henry Ford. A historian a century from now might well conclude that it was Ford who most influenced all manufacturing, everywhere, even to this day, by introducing a new way to make cars--one, strange to say, that originated in slaughterhouses.
? ?Back in the early 1900’s,slaughterhouses used what could have been called a "disassembly line. "Ford reversed this process to see if it would speed up production of a part of an automobile engine called a magneto. Rather than have each worker completely assemble a magneto, one of its elements was placed on a conveyer, and each worker, as it passed, added another component to it, the same one each time. Professor David of the University of Delaware, an expert on industrial development ,tells what happened:
? ?"The previous day,workers carrying out the entire process had averaged one assembly every 20 minutes. But on that day,on the line,the assembly team averaged one every 13 minutes and 10 seconds per person. "
? ?Within a year,the time had been reduced to five minutes. In 1913,Ford went all the way. Hooked together by ropes, partially assembled vehicles were towed past workers who completed them on piece at a time. It wasn’t long before Ford was turning out several hundred thousand cars a year,a remarkable achievement then. And so efficient and economical was this new system that he cup the price of his cars in half,to $ 260,putting them within reach of all those who, up until that time, could not afford them. Soon, auto makers the world over copied him. In fact, he encouraged them to do so by writing a book about all of his innovations, entitled Today and Tomorrow. The Age of the Automobile has arrived. Today, aided by robots and other forms of automation,everything from toasters to perfumes are made on assembly lines.

A magneto is a technical term for______

A:an automobile B:an engine C:a part of an automobile engine D:an automobile engine

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A magneto is a technical term for

A:an automobile B:an engine C:a part of an automobile engine D:an automobile engine