单项选择题
Many strange new means of transport have been developed in our century, the strangest of them being perhaps the hovercraft. In 1953, a former electronics engineer in his fifties, Christopher Cockerell, who had turned to boat-building on the Norfolk Broads, suggested an idea on which be had been working for many years to the British government and industrial circles. It was the idea of supporting a craft on a "pad", or cushion, of low-pressure air, ringed with a curtain of higher pressure air. Ever since, people have had difficulty in deciding whether the craft should be ranged among ships, planes, or land vehicles—for it is something in between a boat and an aircraft. As a ship builder, Cockerell was trying to find a solution to the problem of the wave resistance which wastes a good deal of a surface’s power and limits its speed. His answer was to lift the vessel out of the water by making it ride on a cushion of air, no more than one or two feet thick. This is done by a great number of ring-shaped air jets on the bottom of the craft. It "flies", therefore, but it cannot fly higher—its action depends on the surface, water or ground, over which it rides. |
A.with support of a pad under it
B.with support of a curtain round it
C.with support of a pad of air
D.with support of a cushion of air made by jet engines