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  3. After waiting nearly a week as an Icelandic volcano spewed turbine-mangling ash into the atmosphere — thwarting flights into, ou

After waiting nearly a week as an Icelandic volcano spewed turbine-mangling ash into the atmosphere — thwarting flights into, ou

admin2014-09-18  35
问题     After waiting nearly a week as an Icelandic volcano spewed turbine-mangling ash into the atmosphere — thwarting flights into, out of or through Europe — the airlines are supposed to begin flying passengers again on Tuesday.
    Governments, businesses and most travelers, irritated by disrupted itineraries and worried about lost productivity, are delighted to see planes back in the sky. But I, for one, wish this blessedly jet-free interlude could have continued a little longer.
    In the five decades or so since jets became the dominant means of long-haul travel, the world has benefited immeasurably from the speed and convenience of air travel. But as Orson Welles intoned in "The Magnificent Ambersons," "The faster we’re carried, the less time we have to spare." Indeed, airplanes’ accelerated pace has infected nearly every corner of our lives. Our truncated vacation days and our crammed work schedules are predicated on the assumption that everyone will fly wherever they’re going, that anyone can go great distances and back in a very short period of time.
    So we are condemned to keep riding on airplanes. Which is not really traveling. Airplanes are a means of ignoring the spaces in between your point of origin and your destination. By contrast, a surface journey allows you to look out on those spaces — at eye level and on a human scale, not peering down through breaks in the clouds from 35,000 feet above — from the observation car of a rolling train or the deck of a gently bobbing ship. Surface transport can be contemplative, picturesque and even enchanting in a way that air travel never will be.
    My girlfriend and I recently set out to circumnavigate the globe without the aid of any aircraft. Along the way, we took the Trans-Siberian Railway across the wilds of Russia from Moscow to Vladivostok, and drove a car through the empty doomlands of the Australian outback. These journeys take less than half a day if you go by plane. Each lasts nearly a week when you stick to the ground. But taking to the air means simply boarding, enduring the flight and getting off at another airport. Going our way meant sharing bread and cheese with kindly Russians in a shared train cabin, and drinking beers with Australian jackaroos (we’d call them cowboys) at a lonely desert road-house. These are warm, vivid memories that will stay with us forever.
    My hope is that some travelers stranded by the volcanic eruption have been able to discover the joys of slow travel for themselves. With airplanes out of the picture over the past few days, pretty much the only form of public transport between the United States and Europe has been aboard the Queen Mary II, making one of her weeklong treks between New York and Southampton, England, or on one of the select few container ships that will rent spare cabins to civilian passengers.
    Were you to see a plane flying overhead, you’d look up at its contrail and pity those poor people shrieking through the sky in a cramped aluminum tube. They will arrive days before you, sure. But they will have missed out on the wonders of a journey where there is no choice but to sit back, relax and pleasantly ruminate, as the ship chugs steadily through the waves.
According to the passage, the author thinks that the eruption of the Iceland volcano
选项 A、will cause severe economic setbacks in the airline business
B、is more welcoming than disturbing to most travelers
C、leads to a rise in the number of air travelers
D、may help some travelers to appreciate slow travel more.
答案D
解析 细节题。“Iceland volcano”是定位关键词。选项A未提到，不可依靠常识推断。选项B与文中所说的其他乘客的想法正好相反，多数人对此的感受出现在第二段“irritated by disrupted itineraries and worded about lost productivity, are delighted to see planes back in the sky”。选项C也错误，因为火山灰的问题，很多航班被取消，不可能导致乘客增加。选项D正确，细节可见第六段第一句“My hope is that some travelers stranded by the volcanic eruption have been able to discover the joys of slow travel for themselves．”。
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