雅思学术类阅读真题.docxVIP

READING 1 READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. AIRPORTS ON WATER River deltas are difficult places for map makers. Their river build them up, the seas wears them down; their outlines are always changing The changes in Chinas Pearl River delta,h owever, are more dramatic than these natural fluctuations. An island six kilometres long and with a total area of 1248 hectares is being created there. And the civil engineers are as interested in performance as in speed and size. This is a bit of the delat than they want to endure. The new island of Chek Lap Kok, the site of Hong Kongs mew airport, is 83% complete. The giant dumper trucks rumbling across it will have finished their job by the middle of this year and the airport itself will be built at a similarly breakneck pace. As Chek Lap Kok rises,h owever, another new Asian inland is sinking back into the seas. This is a 520-hectare island built in Osaka Bay, Japan, that serves as the platform for the new Kansai airport, Chek Lap Kok was built in a different way, and thus hopes to avoid the same sinking fate. The usual ways to reclaim land is to pile sand rock on to the seabed. When the seabed oozes with mud, this is rather like placing a textbook on a wet sponge: the weight squeezes the water out, causing both water and sponge to settle lower. The settlement is rarely even: different parts sink at different rates. So buildings, pipes, roads and so on tend to buckle and crack. You can engineer around these problems, or you can engineer them out. Kansai took the first approach; Chek Lap Kok is taking the second. The differences are both political and geological. Kansai was supposed to be builtj ust one kilometre offshore,w here the seabed is quite solid. Fishermen protested,a nd the sitew as shifteda furtherf ive kilometres. That put it in deeper water (around 20 metres) and above a seabed that consisted of 20 metres of soft al