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  3. Titanic: Sinking the Myths "Practically Unsinkable" As soon as the waves of the North Atlantic closed over the stern of RMS

Titanic: Sinking the Myths "Practically Unsinkable" As soon as the waves of the North Atlantic closed over the stern of RMS

admin2012-12-13  91
问题                                    Titanic: Sinking the Myths
"Practically Unsinkable"
    As soon as the waves of the North Atlantic closed over the stern of RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912, the myths began surrounding her design, construction and transatlantic voyage. The Titanic disaster today is a classic tale, a modern folk story, but like all folk stories our understanding of what really happened has been clouded by the way the disaster has been recounted over the years.
    It was said that the builders and owners of Titanic claimed she was "unsinkable". The claim actually made was that she was "practically unsinkable" close enough, but nevertheless an unfortunate statement and one which would haunt both builder and owner for years.
    Titanic, the largest vessel in the world when she entered service in 1912, was neither the finest nor the most technically advanced of her day. Size, seldom an indication that something is better, was the only record she held. The ships that Titanic, and her slightly older sister Olympic, were designed to compete with were the Cunard liners Lusitania and Mauretania, which entered service in 1907. Designed and built as record breakers, both held the coveted "Blue Riband" for the fastest Atlantic crossing. It was built principally from lessons learnt from advances in warship construction, but most importantly was powered by steam turbines driving quadruple screws, fitted with a large balanced rudder(方向舵), making them faster than the competition and easier to manoeuvre. This was a giant leap forward in marine engineering, comparable to the advances made in 1969 with the introduction of the Can corde supersonic aircraft.
Achille’s Heel
    Building ships this large led to inevitable compromises. Titanic adopted tried and trusted methods for her design and construction. No risks were taken with the choice of engines which were enlarged versions of the propulsion system first used experimentally in Laurentic, another White Star liner, in 1909. The triple screw vessel had proved that two expansion engines feeding exhaust steam into a low pressure turbine were more economical than vessels using expansion engines or turbines alone.
    Titanic’s hull(船体) and upper works were also enlarged versions of designs refined over several decades. Her stern(船尾),with its high graceful Counter and long thin rudder, was an exact copy of an 18th-century sailing ship, wrought in steel, a perfect example of the lack of technical development. Compared with the rudder design of the Cunarders, Titanic’s was a fraction of the size. No account was made for advances in scale and little thought was given to how a ship, 852 feel in length, might turn in an emergency or avoid collision with an iceberg. This was Titanic’s Achilles heel.
Speed
    These design differences meant Titanic would never be able to challenge the speed or manoeuvrability of the Cunarders, but this did not matter. White Star had given up all thought of speed records more than a decade be- fore, in 1899, with the introduction of Oceanic, a ship given the title "Clowning Glory of the 19th Century". It was justly deserved, for her interiors were, the finest ever created by the Belfast shipbuilder of Harland & Wolff.
    White Star could not afford to waste the same expense on their new ship Titanic, which was much larger than Oceanic. Titanic, nevertheless, was a fine, well-built vessel, with large public rooms and finely-appointed suites for those travelling in first class. However, there were many other ocean liners built in Britain, France and Germany which were technically superior and had stunning interiors.
    Speed plays a major part in the continuing story of Titanic. It is often said she was trying to make a record on her maiden voyage, attempting to arrive ahead of schedule in New York. Not true. Not all of Titanic’s boilers had been lit and besides this she was sailing on the longer southern route across the Atlantic in order to avoid the very threat which caused her eventual loss. Even if all boilers had been lit, her maximum speed was 21 knots, a far cry from the 26 knots the Cunarders regularly recorded. Titanic did not attempt a full speed crossing because of the risk of potential engine damage, and her passengers would have been inconvenienced by arriving a day before their hotel or train bookings.
Allegations(辩解) of Cowardice
    Bruce Ismay, chairman and managing director of the White Star Line, was a passenger on the ship. At the age of 39 he was also president of the International Mercantile Marine Company, a giant combine and owner-operator of several transatlantic business, at the head of which was White Star. The myths surrounding Ismay are many but almost all centre on allegations of his cowardice in escaping the sinking ship while fellow passengers, notably women and children, were left to care for themselves. The claims made at the time and repeated today were that he "saved his own skin" while others died.
    In reality Ismay helped with loading and lowering several lifeboats and conducted himself better than many of the crew and passengers. He only entered a lifeboat when it was actually being lowered and no other passengers were in the vicinity. Some witnesses stated he was ordered into the lifeboat but, whatever happened, Lord Mersey said at the British enquiry into the loss of Titanic, "Had he not jumped in he would simply have added one more life, namely his own, to the number of those lost."
Captain Smith
    The popular press expected men to die like heroes in 1912. After all Captain Smith had done just that, or had he? In a strange quirk of history the man directly responsible for the loss of Titanic is remembered as a hero, whilst the man who tried to.save lives is labelled a coward.
    Smith failed the passengers and crew of Titanic. He failed to heed ice warnings, did not slow his ship when ice was reported directly in his path and allowed lifeboats to leave the sinking ship partially filled, unnecessarily adding at least 500 names to the list of the dead.
    But what organisation or individual was ultimately to blame? The British government’s Board of Trade allowed Titanic to sail with insufficient lifeboat accommodation. The government simply had not kept abreast of advances in marine engineering and based all life-saving regulations on ships up to 10,000 grt(gross registered tons) which were required to carry 16 lifeboats. Titanic was 46,329 grt. A ship designed to accommodate 3,511 passengers and crew was only required to provide lifeboat accommodation for 962. In fact, White Star provided her with four extra collapsible boats, increasing capacity to 1,178.
    If Smith had not failed in his duty, all these lifeboats could have been loaded to their stated capacity in time, or even with many more, for the numbers reflected shipyard workers, not women and children. In the flat calm conditions that night, the first boat to leave Titanic’s side, with a capacity of 40, contained just 12 people.
    Titanic, famous for that terrible disaster, today stands as a memorial to mankind’s over-confidence in technology and a reminder of how weak we are compared with the forces of nature. But Titanic should also stand as a reminder of an era when millions of emigrants made the voyage across the Atlantic seeking a new life, in a new world—a memorial to a unique event in history.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案A
解析 本题是一个总括性介绍。作者提出了人们之前的看法的一些偏颇之处。通读全文可以发现本篇文章就是针对人们的一些误解而逐一做出解释的。而且从第一段的最后一句话like all folk stories our understanding of what really happened has been clouded by the way the disaster has been recounted over the years 也可以找到答案。
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