【分析解答题】

The world’s long romance with speed may finally be ending.Even ifConcorde (协和式飞机) flies again, its antique nature was revealed as soon as the Paris accident made people scratch their heads and ask quite why these odd aircraft were still flying. Much of the technology that surrounded us has, when we look at it afresh, a Jules Verne quality solving problems that once seemed important in ways that ingenious but not necessarily efficient or safe. The reorientation of science toward the biological and computer frontiers is now truism, but the 19th-century fascination with motive power has retained a powerful hold on our imaginations and our economies. (1) {{U}}Advances in motive power were for a long while the main way in which progress and national competition in technology were measure

D、First at sea, then on the railways, then on the roads, in the air and finally in space, more and more repaid movement was seen as a carefree good thing and also, in some vague way, as a key to a fuller understanding of the world{{/U}}. So intoxicating was this ultimate way in which the growing speed and reach of man-made vehicles could be used that when an unknown rocket enthusiast called Hermann Oberth published hisBy Rocket to Interplanetary Space in the 1920s, it represented such an escape from the difficulties of the present to the anxious citizens of Weimar Germany (德国魏玛共和国) that it became a bestseller overnight. (2) {{U}}For individual sportsmen, pilots and drivers, speed had the status of a privileged substance to which, in those early days, only a minority had full access. Mechanized speed made men, and a few women, into heroes, and it remains a commodity to which males, in particular, are attracted{{/U}}. The front of theBoys OwnAnnual of half a century ago would typically feature a speeding train in the middle ground, a fast aeroplane above, and a racing car in the foreground, its time and behind the times, since the era of small-scale luxury air travel was over.
A、preoccupation with speed has always gone hand in hand with a preoccupation with safety, the two standards between them providing a way in which advanced states calibrate the state of civilization. Increasing speeds have indicated technical progress, while accidents indicate loss of control. The first world lives in constant fear of regression, of losing the scientific and organizational edge that enables it to be both fast and safe. That is one reason why air and sea accidents can attain such mythic status. The disparate treatment of first and third world accidents in the Western press is probably due more to the feeling that accidents are indicators of technical health than to any devaluation ofAfrican orAsian lives. Speed still has its kingdom, but it is shrinking. Its limits have long ago been reached on the roads, and its value in the air, even for manned military aircraft, is diminished agility and protection are as or more important. (3) {{U}}It is still marginally attractive to make trains go faster. The pursuit of physical speed has been replaced by the pursuit of near instantaneity on the Net, an aim which we may in time come to regard just as skeptically{{/U}}. It is hard to imagine the mood in whichDavid Lean’s The SoundBarrier was made in 1952.Breaking that barrier seemed to hold the key to a mystery, but there was no mystery. Man can go faster, but that does not mean it is worth doing so.