You are going to read a newspaper article about an invention. For Questions 1-8 choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.
FLIGHT OF THE FISH
An undersea flying machine could open a whole new world, reports John Davison.
It began as an idea in the imagination of an engineer who had read a lot of comic books about futuristic undersea ships. It took shape in a small workshop with volunteers working two evenings a week to turn the idea into a reality.
Now, Deep Flight 1, the world's first underwater flying machine, is only months away from its first sea trip. There are claims that it could revolutionise exploration of the deep ocean, which is the least studied area on earth. With a top speed of 25 kilometres an hour, it is capable of
going straight up or straight down without the need for special tanks. It can 'fly' through the sea using high pressure and short wings in the same way that an aircraft cuts through the sky.
Scientists, who say we know more about the surface of the moon than the ocean floor, have welcomed the invention. It promises them a cheap and fast method of getting to the bottom of the sea to increase our knowledge about everything from undersea minerals to how life began.
Engineer Graham Hawkes will be in the driving seat for the first trip. He will have to lie with his head surrounded by a glass nose-section.
Originally from South London, he has spent the past five years designing and building Deep Flight I at his two small deep-sea exploration companies in California. The final 'pre-flight' trials are now being carried out by a team of eight.
Hawkes compares his present invention to the one that led to the breaking of the sound harrier in the 1950s. 'Then there was a lot of discussion about the sound barrier, whether you turned into a frog if you went through it, or instantly died, or the machine collapsed into nothing. And so there was a plane built to test that out,' he says. 'Because it was proved that you could break the sound barrier, Concorde was developed a few years later. Now you or I can travel across the Atlantic Ocean in Concorde at twice the speed of sound, sipping champagne. That's the scale of what we're trying to do here.
His ambition, if this first vessel, Deep Flight I, performs well, is to create a second ship capable of descending to 11,000 metres and the deepest point on the planet - straight down to the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Man has been there only once before, in 1960.
If his theory works, he will publish all his data so scientists can use it to develop the vessel they need for the next generation of deep-ocean exploration. 'There's a lot of territory down there to cover;' Hawkes says, 'and it's much more effective to do that at a running pace than at a
slow walk!'
'Advances during the past 25 years have taught us more about the deepest oceans than we learned in the previous 100 years,' says Dr Anthony Rice, head of Sea-floor Biology at the Institute of Oceanographic Sciences in Surrey.
'We already know a great deal about what it's like down there,' says Rice. 'We now want to know why it'S like that, more about the dynamics of the place, more about what goes on there.'
Those dynamics have a lot of influence. Changes in ocean currents cause climatic change and the ocean floor holds a record of the Earth's climatic history, an area being investigated by Rice and his colleagues.
Perhaps most importantly, the ocean floor is where everything that is thrown away eventually ends up. The greatest need is to understand how this evolution works, to estimate possible damage to the earth and our surroundings and see how it might be avoided in the future.
How far Hawkes and his flying machine will go towards answering these grand questions will depend on the first 'flight' of Deep Flight 1 The fact that his technology was developed in something not much bigger than a garage is, for Hawkes, a measure of the neglect that the study of the oceans has suffered, compared with aeroplane technology or with space exploration.
Now Choose the right answer A, B, C, or D