河北专接本-精通教育-英语每日精练0929.docVIP

Passage Two Because helicopters can go almost anywhere, they have been especially useful to explorers. In the jungles of South America they have helped explorers looking for new places to sink oil wells. First of all the helicopters lift the geologists and mineralogists（矿物学家） into the heart of jungle, trying first one area and then another, and when they find a place that seems likely to yield oil, the helicopter can bring in drilling equipment. They can bring in huts in pieces, and very nearly everything that may be needed. If a telephone is needed from the jungle outpost（前哨） back to the main base, then the wires themselves can be laid across the jungle treetops. All the helicopter has to do is to fly close over the trees unreeling the cable from a drum as it goes. It is very comforting for explorers in such places to know that if they are injured or fall ill, they can be flown back to hospital in a few hours. Only twenty years ago a sick man prospecting in the heart of the jungle might have faced a journey of several weeks, traveling part of the way on a bumping stretcher（担架） carried by natives, and part of the way in a slow-moving canoe. Big helicopters can lift loads up to about ten tons. As they can go everywhere and can hover over any chosen spot, these helicopters make excellent flying cranes. Before the days of helicopters, the task of building a radio station on top of a high mountain might have meant building a road or a cable railway first. But a helicopter can carry all the building materials and the workmen up into the position quite easily. Putting a new top on a high structure like a lighthouse used to mean that a scaffolding（脚手架） even higher than the lighthouse had to be built first of all. Now a helicopter can be used to fly over and lower the part gently into position. A helicopter has been used to lower new cross on to the spire of a church in the same way. Helicopters have saved thousands of people from the sea and they have saved