Reading. Ex. 22. Read the text and get the main ideas of it

Ex. 22. Read the text and get the main ideas of it.

International travel has completely changed, and the word has become a global village. Crossing the world is as easy as getting from one side of city to another. The world of air travel has developed into a huge industry.

The airports themselves are remarkable (= замечательный) places: Paris’s strange and space-like Charles de Gaulles, or Dallas' Fort Worth with its Texas vastness. There are airports, which are almost jammed (= загроможденный) with the number of arrivals and departures, like Chicago’s O’Hara or Tokyo’s Haneda; and there are deserted (= пустой, пустынный) airports like Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro, lying beneath the snow of that great mountain waiting for tourists who have never arrived.

But probably one of the greatest of them all is London’s Heathrow, which tops (= возглавляет) the list of both international flights and international passengers. In 2000 it handled 200 destinations and over 42 million passengers with 57 million items (= предмет) of luggage. It has grown into a city of its own, employing 53,000 people full-time.

Like all the great airports, it dates back only to the last days of the Word War II. The first runway was built on the flat land near the village of Staines in 1944. It was a place of historic interest. One of the most important Anglo-Saxon temples is buried under Terminal Two, and the village of Heathrow is now under the main car park.

Heathrow has been operating as an international airport since 1 January 1946, when a British fourth American Airways Lancastrian took off into the morning mists on a flight to Buenos Aires.

Since those early days, constant building has been necessary to deal with the growth of air traffic and the demands of travelers. However Heathrow shares (= разделять) the same problems as all big airports – too many planes, too many people, and too much crime. It is the center-point of the great air routes [rʊ:ts] between Europe and North America in one direction, and between Europe and the Gulf, Africa and Asia in the other. It is the Airport International par excellence (= the very best).

(Headway Intermediate)

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