题目内容:
Questions are based on the following passage.Space exploration has always been the province of dreamers: The human imagination readily soarswhere human ingenuity (创造力) struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the firstscience fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a goodthree centuries before the first manned rockets started to fly.
In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by thedecade's end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated (共鸣) with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous dream speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther KingJr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and transformedAmerican society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up at odds with each other.The fight forracial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的) and immediate in its impact. The urgeto explore space is just the opposite, It is figuratively and literally otherworldly in its aims.
When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollomissions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with nosuccessor. The perpetual argument is that funds are tight, that we have more pressing problems here onEarth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit, reaching toward the stars seems a dispensableluxury--as if saving one-thousandth of a single year's budget would solve our problems.
But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the mostbang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, mapping out the solar system for whateverexplorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting abottom-up assault on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could liewithin reach of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.
The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us--not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off technologies they produce, but because the two types of dreamsfeed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans cantranscend what were once considered inherent limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy,the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend these as well, and the dreamers will deserve alot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is capable of greatness, the more we willactually achieve it.
The author mentions Cyrano de Bergerac in order to show that__________ A.imagination is the mother of invention
B.ingenuity is essential for science fiction writers
C.it takes patience for humans to realize their dreams
D.dreamers have always been interested in science fiction
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