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  3. Not long ago, Barack Obama was hoping that high-speed trains would provide America with the desired benefits. First, building th

Not long ago, Barack Obama was hoping that high-speed trains would provide America with the desired benefits. First, building th

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问题    Not long ago, Barack Obama was hoping that high-speed trains would provide America with the desired benefits. First, building the special tracks and locomotives would put a division or two of America’s army of unemployed back to work. Then, once built, the trains would get people out of cars and planes and to their destinations in a way that would be cleaner and use less foreign oil. But those dreams have mostly died. Republicans have decided that government spending, not outdated infrastructure, is the real problem, and Republican governors in Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio have rejected federal money to begin building.
   Only in California does the dream live on. As Governor Jerry Brown, aged 73 and a Democrat, likes to remember, another big railway project in the 19th century connected the young state to the rest of America. Of late, he has compared his state’s planned high-speed train to the Panama and Suez canals.
   California’s voters used to agree. In a 2008 ballot measure, they approved $9 billion in bonds to fund just such a train. As advertised, it was to connect the two big population centres, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area. The project was to cost $33 billion and be completed as early as 2020.
   Then the iron law of infrastructure projects asserted itself. According to current estimates, the train would in fact cost three times as much or more, and take 13 years longer to build. Mr. Obama still wants to help; he has asked Congress for $35 billion in railway funding over five years, of which $3.5 billion may go to California. But even with the bond funds, those dollops would cover less than 13% of the estimated cost. Republicans are in no mood to allocate more.
   It gets worse. After the ballot measure, it was decided that construction should begin not in the two population centres but in the vast and flat farmlands of the Central Valley, where building is much easier. A highspeed train would then run through sparsely populated countryside, with hardly anybody riding it. Some call this a "train to nowhere" , others a white elephant. Using a rather more original metaphor Richard White, a professor of history at Stanford, calls it "a Vietnam of transportation: easy to begin and difficult and expensive to stop" .
   
The high-speed train was finally planned to begin in_____.
选项 A、the big population centres
B、the San Francisco Bay area
C、the sparsely populated countryside
D、the vast and flat farmlands
答案D
解析 细节题。根据关键词begin in及出题顺序可将答案定位在第五段。由文中it was decided that construction should begin not in the two population centres but in the vast and flat farmlands of the Central Valley可以判断D项“广阔平坦的耕地上”为正确答案。
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