lessonsfromthetitanic文档格式.docx

1、 she was larger at 269 metres than many of the tallest buildings of the day. And with ninedecks, she was as high as an eleven storey building. The Titanic carried 329 first class, 285 second class and 710 third class passengers with 899 crew members, under the care of the very experienced Captain Ed

2、ward J. Smith. She also carried enough food to feed a small town, including 40,000 fresh eggs, 36,000 apples, 50,000 kilos of fresh meat and 1,000 kilos of coffee for the five day journey.RMS Titanic was believed to be unsinkable because the hull was divided into sixteen watertight compartments. Eve

3、n if two of these compartments flooded, the ship could still float. The ships owners could not imagine that, in the case of an accident, the Titanic would not be able to float until she was rescued. It was largely as a result of this confidencein the ship and in the safety of ocean travel that the d

4、isaster could claim such a great loss of life.In the ten hours prior to the Titanics fatal collision with an iceberg at , six warnings of icebergs in her path were received by the Titanics wireless operators. Only one of these messages was formallyposted on the bridge; the others were in various loc

5、ations across the ship. If the combined information in these messages of iceberg positions had been plotted, the ice field which lay across the Titanics path would have been apparent. Instead, the lack of formal procedures for dealing with information from a relatively new piece of technology, the w

6、ireless, meant that the danger was not known until too late. This was not the fault of the Titanic crew. Procedures for dealing with warnings received through thewireless had not been formalized across the shipping industry at the time.The fact that the wireless operators were not even Titanic crew,

7、 but rather contracted workers from a wireless company, made their role in the shipsoperation quite unclear.Captain Smiths seemingly casual attitude in increasing the speed on this day to a dangerous 22 knots or 41 kilometers per hour, can then bepartly explained by his ignorance of what lay ahead.

8、But this only partly accounts for his actions, since the spring weather in Greenland was knownto cause huge chunks of ice to break off from the glaciers. Captain Smith knew that these icebergs would float southward and had already acknowledged this danger by taking a more southerly route than at oth

9、er times of the year. So why was the Titanic travelling at high speed when he knew, if not of the specific risk, at least of the general risk of icebergs in her path As with the lack of coordination of the wireless messages, it was simply standard operating procedure at the time. Captain Smith wasfo

10、llowing the practices accepted on the North Atlantic, practices which had coincided with forty years of safe travel. He believed, wrongly as we nowknow, that the ship could turn or stop in time if an iceberg was sighted by the lookouts.There were around two and a half hours between the time the Tita

11、nic rammed into the iceberg and its final submersion. In this time 705 people were loaded into the twenty lifeboats. There were 473 empty seatsavailable on lifeboats while over 1,500 people drowned. These figures raise two important issues. Firstly, why there were not enough lifeboats toseat every p

12、assenger and crew member on board. And secondly, why the lifeboats were not full. The Titanic had sixteen lifeboats and four collapsible boats which could carry just over half the number of people on board her maiden voyage and only a third of the Titanics total capacity. Regulations for thenumber o

13、f lifeboats required were based on outdated British Board of Trade regulations written in 1894 for ships a quarter of the Titanics size, and had never been revised. Under these requirements, the Titanic was only obliged to carry enough lifeboats to seat 962 people. At design meetings in 1910, the sh

14、ipyards managing director, Alexander Carlisle,had proposed that forty eight lifeboats be installed on the Titanic, but the idea had been quickly rejected as too expensive. Discussion then turnedto the ships dcor, and as Carlisle later described the incident we spent two hours discussing carpet for t

15、he first class cabins and fifteen minutes discussing lifeboats.The belief that the Titanic was unsinkable was so strong that passengers and crew alike clung to the belief even as she was actually sinking. This attitude was not helped by Captain Smith, who had notacquainted his senior officers with t

16、he full situation. For the first hour after the collision, the majority of people aboard the Titanic, including seniorcrew, were not aware that she would sink, that there were insufficient lifeboats or that the nearest ship responding to the Titanics distress calls would arrive two hours after she w

17、as on the bottom of the ocean. As a result, the officers in charge of loading the boats received a very half-hearted response to their early calls for women and children to board thelifeboats. People felt that they would be safer, and certainly warmer, aboard the Titanic than perched in a little boa

18、t in the North Atlantic Ocean.Not realizing the magnitude of the impending disaster themselves, the officers allowed several boats to be lowered only half full.Procedures again were at fault, as an additional reason for the officers reluctance to lower the lifeboats at full capacity was that they fe

19、ared the lifeboats would buckle under the weight of 65 people. They had not been informed that the lifeboats had been fully tested prior to departure. Such procedures as assigning passengers and crew to lifeboats and lifeboat loading drills were simply not part of the standard operation of ships nor

20、 were they included in crew training at this time. As the Titanic sank, another ship, believed to have been the Californian, was seen motionless less than twenty miles away. The ship failed to respond to the Titanics eight distress rockets. Although theofficers of the Californian tried to signal the

21、 Titanic with their flashing Morse lamp, they did not wake up their radio operator to listen for adistress call. At this time, communication at sea through wireless was new, and the benefits not well appreciated, so the wireless on ships was oftennot operated around the clock. In the case of the Cal

22、ifornian, the wireless operator slept unaware while 1,500 Titanic passengers and crew drownedonly a few miles away. After the Titanic sank, investigations were held in both Washington and London. In the end, both inquiries decided that no one could be blamed for the sinking. However, they did addres

23、s the fundamental safety issues which had contributed to the enormous loss of life. As a result, international agreements were drawn up to improve safety procedures at sea. The new regulations covered 24 hour wireless operation, crew training, proper lifeboat drills, lifeboat capacity for all on boa

24、rd and the creation of an international ice patrol.Reading task type one: summary completionTask descriptionThe input for this type of question will be a summary of all or part of thereading text. The summary will contain a number of gaps. All of theinformation in the summary will be contained in th

25、e reading text, althoughthe words used will be different. You will also be provided with a list ofwords to use to fill the gaps. There will be more words than gaps. Thesewords have been chosen so that only one word will be suitable for eachgap （the answer） but other words may appear suitable （distra

26、cters）.Your task is to complete the summary using one word from the list foreach gap. Because the summary is a paraphrase of the reading text（rather than an edited version）, you will need to have a goodunderstanding of the overall meaning and main points of the sectionsummarised, rather than a detai

27、led understanding of the text.What is being tested is your ability to:= skim the text for information= paraphrase the original text 1999 Holmesglen Institute of TAFE 7Sample taskComplete the summary below. Choose your answers from the box at thebottom of the page and write them in boxes 1-8 on your

28、answer sheet.NB There are more words than spaces so you will not use them all.You may use any of the words more than once.List of Wordspassengers happy float advancedlifeboats confident dangers oceanworried inadequate enormous excitementfast handbook water afloatrecord fast procedures ordersdrown size sink safetyThe Finest Ship Ever BuiltThe North Atlantic Ocean crossing on the Titanic was expected to set anew standard for （1） travel in terms of comfort and （2） Theshipping industry had an excellent safety （3） on the North AtlanticCrossing over the prev