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  3. Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon

Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon

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问题     Perhaps there is only the moon to compare with it. Of all the achievements of American engineering, only the landing on the moon and the planting there of a wrinkled flag can rival the construction of Panama Canal as an epoch-making accomplishment. The Suez Canal, the trans-Siberian Railroad and the Taj Mahal all pale beside it. The canal’s construction is more closely akin to the pyramids of Egypt in its scope and difficulty of execution, but in the modern era, there is only the moon.
    Like the landing on the moon, the construction of a canal across the narrow Isthmus of Panama was a dream long before it became reality. As early as 1534, Charles I of Spain proposed a canal at Panama, but it would take nearly 400 years for builders to catch up with his imagination.
    When the canal finally was proposed required all the creativity the twentieth century could muster. It was the largest public work ever attempted. Its engineers had to control a wild river, cut the continental divide, construct the largest dam and man made lake known to that date and swing the largest locks ever constructed from the biggest cement structures then poured. Along the way, two of the world’s most devastating diseases had to be wiped out in one of their greatest strongholds. And all of this was to be done without the airplane or the automobile: Kitty Hawk rose into the head-lines in 1903 the same year the U. S. signed a treaty with Panama——and there was no road across the isthmus until the World War Ⅱ.
    If Panama has had an unusual role in bygone dreams, it most certainly has a startling relationship to the hard facts of geography. The country is farther east than most people imagine——the canal and about half of Panama actually lie east of Miami. Because of the country’s shallow "S" shape and east-west orientation, it has places where the sun rises in the Pacific and sets in the Atlantic. More significantly, Panama is squeezed into the narrowest portion of Central. At the canal, just 43 miles of land separate Atlantic and Pacific shores. Perhaps even more important, Panama offers the lowest point in the North American continental divide—— originally 312 feet above sea level at the canal’s Culebra Cut. By comparison, the lowest pass in the United States is nearly 5,000 feet.
The canal was built with the help of ______. ( )
选项 A、the airplane
B、the automobile
C、both the plane and the automobile
D、neither the plane nor the automobile
答案D
解析
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