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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 Republicans have decided that government spending, not outdated infrastructure, is the real problem, and Republican governors in Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio have rejected federal money to begin building.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" .
   
In the last paragraph, "a white elephant" probably refers to something_____.
选项 A、easy and expensive
B、expensive and useless
C、difficult and expensive
D、easy and huge
答案B
解析 含义题。根据题干关键词定位至最后一段。解答此题需要结合上下文。上文提到高铁将穿梭于人迹稀少的乡村地区，当然也基本不会有人乘坐，这说明它没什么用。因此some call this“a train to nowhere”，others a white elephant，some…others为并列结构，可见a white elephant与a train to nowhere有相同之处，即高铁实际上没什么用。下文用一个比喻来形容a Vietnam of transportation：easy to begin and difficult and expensive to stop(开始容易结束难，且费用昂贵)。再结合全文可知，修建高铁即昂贵又没什么用，因此a white elephant即指“昂贵而无用之物”，B项为正确答案。
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