Interstellar travel

Interstellar travel is (1) ___ on the pages of science fiction tales, but most of the scientists and engineers who have studied the (2) ___ are pessimistic about the (3) ___ of flying to the stars. The cost of propellant, they note, might well (4) ___ the total current energy output of the industrialized world. A starship at a high speed would have to (5) ___ or evade every tiny interstellar dust (6) ___, as in space it would be comparable to a cannon ball. These and many other high hurdles lie between here and a real-world (7) ___ of Star Trek.

Still, one wonders. A (8) ___ invitation is contained in the special theory of relativity, which shows that the (9) ___ of time aboard a starship moving at nearly the velocity of light would be so much slower than here on Earth that astronauts could travel (10) ___ distances in (11) ___ periods. If their ship could maintain a (12) ___ acceleration that reproduced the force of Earth’s (13) ___, they could sail all the way to the Andromeda galaxy in less than thirty years of on-board time. But they could never return. By the time they (14) ___ Andromeda, two million years would have (15) ___ back home.

1	A routine	B route	C rumour
2	A item	B issue	C agenda
3	A probe	B perspective	C prospect
4	A proceed	B exceed	C precede
5	A deflect	B deviate	C reflect
6	A grind	B grate	C grain
7	A implementation	B completion	C realization
8	A hunting	B haunting	C humble
9	A pasture	B patch	C passage
10	A vast	B expand	C expanse
11	A controllable	B measurable	C manageable
12	A regular	B smooth	C steady
13	A aggravation	B gravity	C grave
14	A achieved	B arrived	C reached
15	A expired	B terminated	C exhausted

JOKES

• The American space program made medical history. It was the first time a capsule took a man.

• This morning I turned on the radio and got some amazing news. The newscaster said, “We have some good and some bad news for the people of the world. The bad news is that we have been invaded by thousands of Martians. The good news is that they eat politicians and pee petrol”.

• It is always that way – whenever you want to get somewhere fast, it seems as if the universe is rapidly expanding.