Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
The Panama Canal opened almost one hundred years
ago. More than one million ships have passed through
the waterway since nineteen fourteen. The Panama
Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It
reduces travel by thirteen thousand kilometers. It
avoids the need for ships to sail around Cape Horn
at the bottom of South America. More than forty
ships pass through the canal each day -- more than
fourteen thousand each year. Now, a major expansion
project will permit more ships -- and bigger ships
-- to pass through the canal. Jorge Luis Quijano is
the Panama Canal's executive vice president of
engineering. He says: "The present canal has a total
capacity of about three hundred and forty million
tons a year that it can handle, that's the maximum
capacity. With the expansion we expect to double
that, over six hundred million tons that we can
handle in a year." Ships pass through a series of
locks. These locks raise a ship to the level of
Gatun Lake at the canal entrance on the Atlantic
side. They lower the ship back to sea level on the
Pacific side. For years, shipbuilders limited the
size of many ships so that they could fit through
the Panama Canal. But now many shipping companies
use bigger ships to transport more goods as a way to
reduce costs. Jorge Luis Quijano says the expansion
project will allow many of these larger ships to use
the canal. "This new canal actually is offering a
larger vessel that it can handle, with deeper draft
with a longer and wider vessel." Workers are
building the new locks alongside the old ones, which
will remain in use. The existing locks are three
hundred five meters long and thirty-three meters
wide.The new ones will be four hundred twenty-seven
meters long and fifty-five meters wide. They will be
able to handle ships with drafts of more than
fifteen meters. Currently ships can ride only twelve
meters deep in the canal.Engineers could not make
the new locks too big. Mr. Quijano says the plans
had to balance the size of the locks with the cost
for ships to use the canal. "We had to look at the
optimal size of vessel that would make the return on
the investment of a high value to us. So we chose
what size of vessels that could actually pay for
this project." The cost is estimated at more than
five billion dollars. The new locks are set to open
in twenty fourteen, the one hundredth anniversary of
the Panama Canal. You can watch a video about the
project at voaspecialenglish.com. For VOA Special
English, I'm Carolyn Presutti.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
