Passage 30

At the bottom of the world lies a mighty continent still wrapped in the Ice Age and, until recent times, unknown to man. It is a great land mass crisscrossed by mountain ranges whose extent and elevation are still uncertain. Much of the continent is a complete blank on our maps. A 1000-mile stretch of the coastline has never been reached by any ship. Man has explored, on foot, less than one per cent of its area. Antarctica differs fundamentally from the Arctic regions. The Arctic is an ocean, covered with drifting packed ice and hemmed in by the land masses of Europe, Asia, and North America. The Antarctic is a continent almost as large as Europe and Australia combined, centred roughly on the South Pole andsurrounded by the most unobstructed water

areas of the world---the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans.

The continental ice sheet is more than two miles high in the centre; thus, the air over the Antarctic is far more refrigerated than it is over the Arctic regions. This cold air cascades off the land with such force that it makes the nearby seas the stormiest in the world and renders unliveable those regions whose counterparts at the opposite end of the globe are inhabited. Thus, more than a million persons live within 2,000 miles of the North Pole in an area that includes most of Alaska, Siberia, and Scandinavia -- a region rich in forest and mining industries. Apart from a handful of weather stations, within the same distance of the South Pole there is not a single tree, industry, or settlement.

  1. At the time this article was written, our knowledge of Antarctica was .

    1. very limited

    2. vast

    3. suppressed

    4. nonexistent

  2. The Antarctic is made uninhabitable primarily by .

    1. cold air

    2. calm seas

    3. ice

    4. lack of knowledge

  3. According to this article .

    1. 2000 people live on the Antarctic Continent

    2. a million people live within 2 000 miles of the South Pole

    3. weather conditions within a 2 000-mile radius of the South Pole

      make settlements impractical

    4. only penguins inhabit Antarctica

  4. When this article was written, the only human inhabitants in Antarctica were .

    1. miners

    2. meteorologists

    3. Scandinavians

    4. Siberians

  5. The best title for this selection would be .

    1. Iceland

    2. Land of Opportunity

    3. The Unknown Continent

    4. Utopia at Last