Narrator: Now listen to part of a lecture on the topic you just read about.
Professor: Even if we assume that travel via the proposed Project X system worked exactly according to plan—and that’s a big if—it… it’s not clear that it would produce many of the advantages people expect. For one thing, it is foolish to assume that any mass transit system will be free of errors or accidents. And based on the design of the system, any such accident would almost certainly result in massive damage to the system, in addition to the loss of human life. Compare this to air travel, which overall has extremely low rates of accidents and deaths… the Project X system would have to operate almost perfectly to be deemed safer than air travel. And since the system would involve tubes built underground, safeguarding them from acts of terrorism could prove costly and difficult.
Here’s another problem: The system runs on electricity. What happens if electric power is lost during operation? You know, a blackout? If power were lost suddenly while a pod was in transit, it is very hard to say exactly what would happen. Maybe everything would be fine, maybe not.
Finally, the technology described in this proposal is simply, um… unproven. Nothing in it violates any laws of physics, but there’s been very little testing completed to show that it would reliably work as expected. The technology described in this system is highly advanced and very sensitive to normal wear and tear—things like dirt and cracks—and maintaining the system could prove much more expensive than predicted. When you combine that with initial cost estimates to build the planned route that are, most likely, far too low, it seems very unlikely that Project X would turn out to be as economically attractive as its inventor would predict.
The lecturer is not confident that the Project X will be as much of a transportation breakthrough that the passage describes. First, the lecturer explains that the system would have to perform almost perfectly in order to be safer and less expensive than other transportation options. Since the travel occurs in an enclosed system, there can literally be zero accidents or else it is possible the whole tunnel could be destroyed. If one plane is grounded, other planes can still fly. However, if a pod is involved in an accident, other pods couldn’t travel. This would make each accident very expensive because the whole system could shut down
The lecturer is clearly skeptical about how the system is powered, too. Because Project X would run on electricity, what would happen if the power fails? People trapped in an undergrund pod would have to be rescued. Power failures do happen and would definitely impact the safeyt and cost of Project X.
The lecturers final complaint about Project X is the unproven technology. The lecturer asserts that the technology is almost completely untested. It should work from a theoretical perspective, but nobody knows whether it actually will. Nothing exists that is similar to Project X. So the cost estimates might be completely wrong and the system might be much more expensive to build and maintain than expected. The lecturer doesn’t think people will adopt a transportation system based on technology that is so untested.
The student explains the lecturer’s position very well. She details the examples from the lecture and doesn’t have many errors or typos. However, the last line of her response makes a point that the lecturer does not actually say. The student assumed this herself. Be careful to reflect what the lecturer actually says, not what you might think yourself.