新视野大学英语读写教程听力 第三册 te-unit07-b

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[00:00.00]喜欢hxen.net，就把hxen.net复制到QQ个人资料中！The Chunnel
[00:-1.00]1  Queen Elizabeth and French President
[00:-2.00]Francois Mitterrand will ride a train downward
[00:-3.00]into the $15 billion Channel Tunnel today,
[00:-4.00]crossing the English Channel
[00:-5.00]by land for the first time since it was a marsh 8,000 years ago.
[00:-6.00]2  Common people still have to fly, take a boat, or swim.
[00:-7.00]3  Though today is the official opening ceremony,
[00:-8.00]visitors are still excluded from the most enormous
[00:-9.00]privately funded construction project ever.
[00:10.00]No one can ride through the tunnel yet:
[00:11.00]neither the people who own stock in the company,
[00:12.00]nor the officers of the 220 banks that provided history's biggest loan,
[00:13.00]nor the 3,000 journalists trying to imagine three parallel tunnels
[00:14.00]beneath 100 feet of water and 130 feet of clay.
[00:15.00]4  When it really opens, probably in October,
[00:16.00]the 31-mile Channel Tunnel (the Chunnel, for short)
[00:17.00]will be 15 months behind schedule and $7 billion over a budget set in 1987.
[00:18.00]That's when workmen using huge machines began
[00:19.00]clawing out 1,000 tons of clay every half
[00:20.00]hour as they bored from England to France.
[00:21.00]The main causes of recent delays
[00:22.00]have been linking two very different railroad systems.
[00:23.00]And security: how to make such a big target attack-proof.
[00:24.00]Officials won't tell reporters the time
[00:25.00]at which the queen and president will make their trip.
[00:26.00]5  People on both sides of the English Channel
[00:27.00]are proud of the engineering achievement.
[00:28.00]But most wonder if it's worth it given their
[00:29.00]respective lack of affection for each other.
[00:30.00]"If they had linked us to Spain,
[00:31.00]that would have been more use to us now, wouldn't it?"
[00:32.00]says one man from London.
[00:33.00]Spain is a favorite vacation destination for the British.
[00:34.00]He laughs when a film about the Chunnel
[00:35.00]says it will make the British feel more European.
[00:36.00]6  "Only advertising," he says.
[00:37.00]"The British will never feel European."
[00:38.00]7  The Kingdom of England has been trying to conquer,
[00:39.00]or defend itself from, Europe for 1,000 years.
[00:40.00]If not for the channel,
[00:41.00]England or France surely would have swallowed the other.
[00:42.00]"A whole generation still remembers when only 21 miles stoodbetween Hitler
[00:43.00]and the conquest of England,"
[00:44.00]says a professor of English history.
[00:45.00]8  Although Britain and France both use the metric system
[00:46.00]and the same electrical voltage (220 volts),
[00:47.00]it sometimes seems as if they have little else in common.
[00:48.00]The British and the French rarely marry each other.
[00:49.00]The French remain afraid that their language will die out.
[00:50.00]The British think a sick animal will drag itself through the tunnel
[00:51.00]and introduce the island nation to new diseases.
[00:52.00]9  The differences go on.
[00:53.00]10  Upon leaving Paris,
[00:54.00]trains will whistle along at an approximate speed of 186 miles per hour
[00:55.00]until they go underground,
[00:56.00]but will creep along as slow as 50 miles per hour
[00:57.00]behind local trains the last 68 miles to London.
[00:58.00]Britain won't improve its system until after the year 2000,
[00:59.00]spurring Mitterrand to joke
[-1:00.00]that passengers will have "plenty of time for sightseeing".
[-1:-1.00]11  Time across the channel:
[-1:-2.00]35 minutes compared to 90 minutes by sea.
[-1:-3.00]Total travel time,
[-1:-4.00]including getting on and off the train:
[-1:-5.00]1 hour, 35 minutes.
[-1:-6.00]12  The idea of linking England to the European mainland
[-1:-7.00]by tunneling beneath the channel
[-1:-8.00]goes back to 1802 when an engineer suggested it to Napoleon.
[-1:-9.00]Napoleon was too busy and dozens of other efforts were abandoned
[-1:10.00]including serious ones in 1884, 1923, and 1974.