Goodbye to traffic jams? - Practice Exam

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Choice Reading · Expert Proficiency Resource Book, Pearson Education

You are going to read an article about road transport. For questions 1–6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

No exhibit was more popular at the 1939 World's Fair in New York than General Motors (GM) 'Futurama', the Norman Bel Geddes-designed fantasia of vast, modern and largely empty superhighways swooping past tall towers. More than thirty thousand visitors a day were captivated by what was described as 'a prophecy of cities, towns and countryside served by a comprehensive road system'. The US may have got that road network – the vast Interstate Highway System knitting together a nation – but little else of Bel Geddes' automotive utopia came to fruition. Nor could the designer's dream of smoothly speeding traffic survive its own internal contradiction: that those great empty roads would, inevitably, fill and then grind to a halt. At Expo 2010, the World Exposition held in Shanghai, GM was once more envisioning the future of transport, but the changed tenor of the times was evident. Instead of big cars with tailfins soaring down an ever-expanding highway network, GM's pavilion featured small, whimsical vehicles plugged into electric – and wireless – networks. But the spirit of Bel Geddes endures. Jean Liu-Barnocki, the pavilion's deputy director, predicted that in future 'people will be relieved from the stress of driving and have more free time behind the wheel.' And that's not all: 'Information sharing between cars will eliminate accidents and traffic jams,' he says. To hear Liu-Barnocki talk, GM could well be taking a page from Bel Geddes, circa 1940, in his prescient book Magic Motorways, in which he envisioned drivers receiving messages from highways, traffic signals talking to cars, and automated highways that maintained the 'control of speed and spacing of cars in the same traffic lane'. The future of driving always seems to be further away than it appears. But the onset of increasingly sophisticated and inexpensive technologies – everything from GPS to WiFi to Lidar (think radar, but with light waves) – along with the sheer necessity of managing our limited transport networks more efficiently, means we are drawing closer to a radical re-imagining of the driving experience. Crucially, we are possibly coming to grips with a problem that has plagued society since the days of Caesar's Rome: traffic. Technologically, the roads of tomorrow are drawing into view. The idea of traffic signals communicating with cars, for example, is becoming a reality, and intersections warning drivers that another vehicle is approaching are being tested in a European Union-funded research project. And as for the speed of cars, and distance between them being controlled in a designated traffic lane, this is coming to fruition under the EU's Safe Road Trains for the Environment or Sartre, programme. This creates highway 'platoons' in which groups of wirelessly connected vehicles move automatically in the wake of a human-controlled lead vehicle. As project director Tom Robinson of the British transport company Ricardo explains, as well as regularising how fast traffic flows, the platoons will also be more efficient in terms of fuel use and arguably safer. They could even help reduce so-called 'ghost jams', those shockwaves of clogged traffic caused by variations in driver speed or braking that can bloom into full-blown jams. German researchers have already successfully tested the concept with trucks. The road to smarter traffic does have a potential fork. There are two schools of thought, says Kevin Borras, editor of the publication Thinking Highways. One of them argues that 'the future of traffic technology is in co-operative systems, cars that communicate with other cars or with the infrastructure'; the second says that 'the future is going to be hand-held, that personal and personalised information is going to be the way forward'. Borras expects it to be a combination of the two. Because it's one thing to sort out the best routes for the traffic network as a whole, it's another to entice individual drivers into taking them – sometimes the social hurdles are greater than the technological ones. Then there are the questions of assigning legal liability when driver-assist technology fails. It is also unclear how drivers themselves will respond to surrendering their autonomy. At Honda's research centre in Ohio, I was told that some drivers were uncomfortable with the safe following distance set by engineers in adaptive cruise control systems – they felt there was too much space. As Henry Barnes, New York traffic commissioner in the 1960s, once noted, 'As time goes on the technical problems become more automatic, while the people problems become more surrealistic.'

Its principal prediction has become a reality.

Its visual impact outweighed its practical contribution.

It failed to take into account existing advances in technology.

It placed too much emphasis on the speed at which traffic would move.

What is suggested about Bel Geddes' 'Futurama' in the first paragraph?

It picked up on ideas from Bel Geddes' exhibit.

It reflected changed priorities since Bel Geddes' day.

It appeared far less imaginative than Bel Geddes' model.

It tended to focus more on drivers and vehicles than Bel Geddes did.

What point does the writer make about the exposition in Shanghai?

attempts to alleviate traffic congestion often lack foresight.

technology alone cannot solve problems of traffic congestion.

traffic congestion has always presented an intractable problem.

the management of traffic congestion has hardly developed since then.

The writer mentions 'Caesar's Rome' to emphasise his point that

The possibility of human error is removed from driving.

Certain types of traffic congestion would be avoided.

One driver would control the speed of all vehicles.

The environmental benefits that would result.

What is the main advantage of the 'platoons' mentioned in the fourth paragraph?

are likely to be delayed by disagreements.

may be too ambitious to work in practice.

seem to be heading in conflicting directions.

are coming about as a result of a compromise.

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