Passage: Moving through Mountains
Moving through Mountains
An age-old proverb says that necessity is the mother of invention. (2) Centuries of human ingenuity in the face of obstacles prove this to be true. (3) For many years the Swiss Alps, a mountain range spanning southern Switzerland and northern Italy, were such an obstacle. (4) Roads and railways had to navigate around the mountains or through winding tunnels inside the mountains, making the transportation of people and goods difficult and time consuming. (5) In 2016 these burdens were eased with the completion of the Gotthard Base Tunnel. Construction of the high-speed railway tunnel began in 1996.
(7) The tunnel was created through the use of tunnel-boring machines, which are giant drills with a flat rotating head called a cutter head. (8) Each of the tunnel-boring machines used during the construction of the tunnel was about the length of four football fields arranged end-to-end. (9) During the seventeen-year construction period, 28 million tons of rock were removed, enough to rebuild the Great Pyramid of Giza five times. (10) This massive construction project is reported to have cost $12 billion. (11) After that, 4 million cubic meters of concrete, or enough concrete to build eighty-four Empire State Buildings, were used to construct and support the tunnel.
By 2020 the high-speed railway will carry more than 250 freight trains and 55 passenger trains a day, with most traveling at speeds of around 100 to 125 miles per hour. (13) It will be faster for people to travel between northern and southern Europe. (14) The travel time between the European cities of Zurich, Switzerland, and Milan, Italy, will be reduced by an hour. (15) Many European leaders compare the Gotthard Base Tunnel to the Channel Tunnel, a 33-mile underwater tunnel that connects the United Kingdom and France. (16) While there is no roadway in the Channel Tunnel, people can drive their cars onto special trains that will carry vehicles through to the other side.
Just as traffic congestion in major cities led to the construction of underground local transportation, natural formations, such as mountain ranges, have also sent people underground for faster, easier, and cheaper methods of transportation across larger areas. (18) There is renewed interest in constructing innovative methods of transportation that will help eliminate problems associated with traveling to and from certain areas.
Where should sentence 11 be moved in order to improve the organization of the second paragraph (sentences 6–11)?
- Ato the beginning of the paragraph (before sentence 6)
- Bbetween sentences 6 and 7
- Cbetween sentences 8 and 9
- Dbetween sentences 9 and 10
Show the answer
Correct answer: D
The Answer is (D)
The question asks where sentence 11, which completes the detailed steps of how the tunnel was built, should be moved within the second paragraph in order to improve the organization of the paragraph.
Option D, placing the sentence between sentences 9 and 10, is correct because placing the sentence there helps the reader understand the full sequence of steps performed in constructing the tunnel before the cost of the project is introduced.
Option A, placing the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph (before sentence 6), is incorrect because it would not make sense since the process of building the tunnel has not yet been introduced.
Similarly, Option B is incorrect because placing the sentence after sentence 6 would not make sense given that adding concrete would have to happen after the rock was broken down and removed from the tunnel.
Option C, placing the sentence between sentences 8 and 9, would also be incorrect because the use of concrete did not take place before the removal of “28 million tons of rock” (sentence 9).