【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】[听力原文]
Let's imagine that an American businessman has to go to Pads on a business trip. On the morning of the trip, he gets into his single-seat car that gets more than a hundred miles per gallon. He drives it into an automated, moving traffic lane that takes him directly to a "rail-port", or train station. He leaves his car there and gets on a train that travels at three hundred miles per hour. Within a few minutes, he arrives at the airport. He and a thousand other passengers get on a plane that is made almost entirely of plastic.
Computers control the plane, which travels at supersonic speed, so our businessman is in Paris in less than three hours.
Does this description sound fantastic to you? Well, according to transportation experts, we can expect many changes in transportation technology in the twenty-first century. All the forms of transportation that we use today will still be popular, but they will be very different in design, materials, and technology. In today's lecture, we're going to look at how these familiar modes of transportation will change in the next fifty to a hundred years.
Naturally, we will start by talking about the automobile, which will still be the most important method of getting around, just as it is today. But of course, we can expect many improvements. First of all, our cars will become totally electronic. They will routinely "talk" to us, reminding us to turn off our lights, get gas, or fix something. Of course, every car will have a telephone. In addition, the cars of the future will be smaller and more economical. We will probably continue to use gasoline for fuel at least until the end of the century, but gasoline mileage will probably go up to seventy-five or one hundred miles per gallon.
Besides the car, several other well-known methods of transportation will be very important of traveling in cities. First, many people will use subways and other rapid transit systems, even though they will be expensive. Second, bus service will increase. The new buses will look different from today's and will be able to carry up to a hundred and fifty people. During rush hours, they will travel in special bus lanes or maybe even on separate roads especially for buses. Third, for short trips, there will be many "people movers". These are sidewalks that move at ten or fifteen miles per hour. In fact, they already exist today in many modern airports.
Now, for long-distance traveling between cities, buses will still be the cheapest way, but they will probably become more comfortable than they are today. Imagine a bus with sleeper-seats, video games, movies, and even meal service. Buses will change a lot, but trains will change even more. For one thing, they will become extremely fast. Trains of the future will not travel on rails as they do today; instead, they will move above the tracks, which will allow them to go as fast as two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles per hour. With such a train, a trip between Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois, would take just half an hour. In the 21st century, people will easily be able to live in one state and work in another.
We can conclude that land transportation will be faster and more comfortable than it is today. What about air travel? First, the airplanes of the future will be made of plastic. As a result, they will be quieter, faster, cleaner, and more economical. They will also be larger, carrying up to a thousand people. Planes will all have computers as pilots, although there will always be a human pilot on the plane in case anything goes wrong. In the passenger area, sleeping arrangements will be more comfortable than they are today. In addition, each passenger will have a private TV set in the back of the seat in front of him.
With all these improvements in transportation systems, we can predict that in the 21st century, people will travel more often and farther than they do now. Our world will become a smaller place, and there will probably be much more contact between people from different cultures than there is today.