6. Road and tunnels.

1. Read and translate the text.

Road and tunnels.

1. British roads are classified in three groups. The arterial roads, so called because they might be compared to the arteries in the human body, are known as A or Class I roads. The arterial roads include the principal roads radiating from London to far parts of the country, and many roads joining big cities. The second group of classified roads consists of В or Class II roads which are a little less important than A roads. Last comes a third group, which has no official name. Each road of the first two classes, A and B, has a different number, which appears on all signposts, so that a motor driver can find his way across Britain if he has previously looked up the number on a map.

2. The crowded state of the British roads caused many accidents and delays even before World War II and became much worse after­wards. For some years little was done to tackle the problem apart from widening the roads in places and making by-pass roads around towns to avoid traffic jams in busy streets. In the late 1950s a programme was begun for building some 400 miles of motorways in the form of a network over the country, the chief ones radiating from London to the industrial areas in South Wales, the Midlands, and Lancashire. These modern double-track highways are being built with fly-over junctions and crossings and will in time form part of a system of motorways run­ning right across Europe.

3. A motorway is usually designed with two carriage-ways, one for traffic in each direction. These should be at least 30 feet apart to avoid the vision of drivers being dazzled by the lights of vehicles coming the other way. The two carriage-ways needn't run side by side. A width of 24 feet between kerbs usually gives ample room for passing, but some roads are wider, for example the London-Birmingham motorway is 36 feet wide. At all cross-roads there are fly-over or clover-leaf cros­sings.

4. In thinly populated tropical countries, where the earth is dry and sandy, roads to carry occasional traffic can be made quite cheaply. The soil is turned over and mixed with a small quantity of cement, watered, and finally rolled, after which it has quite a good hard surface.

5.In many countries there are high-speed motorways, like the Ger­man "autobahnen" or Italian "autostrade". They are usually fenced in, and motorists are admitted to them only at special gates where they pay a toll. Once inside, they can travel at 80 or 90 miles an hour, for there are hardly any junctions, and no slow moving traffic is allowed.

6. Europe's first automobile tunnel under the Alps — the 3.4-mile Great St. Bernard Tunnel between Italy and Switzerland — was offi­cially opened to traffic on the 19 March 1969. The tunnel was under construction slightly over five years and cost about 38 million dollars. Actual digging starting from both sides was under way from February 1959 to April 1961. Some 1,650 tons of explosives were used to excavate more than a million cubic yards of rock. The project also required 44,000 tons of steel for use in the construction of walls and road-bed, and 165,000 tons of reinforced concrete for lining the inside of the tunnel. The tun­nel has a two-line road-bed 24 ft. wide and 14 ft. 9 in. high. Leading up to it on both sides are several miles of approaches built on concrete stilts and roofed with concrete to protect the roads from snow and ava­lanches and make them useable throughout the year. Up to now the Great St. Bernard Pass has been closed much of the year by snow.

7. More than 30,000 cars a year are expected to use the tunnel. Tolls range from 2.10 dollars to 4.65 depending on the engine, size of the car and the number of passengers. There are 12 other important tunnels under the Alps in central Europe all for rail traffic. Soon a second Alpine motor tunnel will be ready. It will connect Italy and France under Mont Blanc.