9712托福阅读真题.docVIP

1997.12 北美考试真题 Section Three: Reading Comprehension Questions 1-10 Before the mid-1860s, the impact of the railroads in the United States was limited, in the sense that the tracks ended at the Missouri River, approximately the centers of the country. At that point the trains turned their freight, mail, and passengers over to steamboats, wagons, and stagecoaches. This meant that wagon freighting, stagecoaching (5) and steamboating did not come to an end when the first train appeared; rather they became supplements or feeders. Each new end-of-track became a center for animal- drawn or waterborne transportation. The major effect of the railroad was to shorten the distance that had to be covered by the older, slower, and more costly means. Wagon freighters continued operating throughout the 1870s and 1880s and into the 1890s, (10) although over constantly shrinking routes, and coaches and wagons continued to crisscross the West wherever the rails had not yet been laid. The beginning of a major change was foreshadowed in the later 1860s, when the Union Pacific Railroad at last began to build westward from the Central Plaints city of Omaha to meet the Central Pacific Railroad advancing eastward form California through (15) the formidable barriers of the Sierra Nevada. Although President Abraham Lincoln signed the original Pacific Railroad bill in 1862 and a revised, financially much more generous version in 1864, little construction was completed until 1865 on the Central Pacific and 1866 on the Union Pacific. The primary reason was skepticism that a railroad built through so challenging and thinly settled a stretch of desert, mountain, (20) and semiarid plain could pay a profit. In the words of an economist, this was a case of premature enterprise, where not only the cost of construction but also the very high risk deterred private investment. In discussing the Pacific Railroad bill, the chair of the congressional committee bluntly stated that without