Question

11 “Here we are, less than a month until the turn of the millennium,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote in December 1999, “and what I want to know is, what happened to the flying cars?” This question resonated with a generation who grew up watching Jetsons reruns. “Our failure to produce flying cars seems like a particular betrayal,” Collins added, getting to her real point, “since it was so central to our image.”

12 Why a betrayal?

13 From 1946 to 1964, the postwar Baby Boom created a tremendous demand for housing. With new expressways came rapidly growing suburbs, so cars became all-important. Cars were not just another mode of transportation; they were a symbol of freedom. Buses and trains could get you around. But a car—that was individual liberty.

14 Of course, with expressways and ever-longer commutes came traffic jams. When you’re stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, that symbol of freedom suddenly felt more like a trap. Just imagine if your car could fly, though. You couldn’t get any freer than that.

15 If automobiles could revolutionize the fast-paced twentieth century, surely flying cars would do the same for the even faster-paced twenty-first century. In 1962, when The Jetsons first aired, John Glenn had just orbited Earth, and President Kennedy had promised we would “go to the moon,” so the sky was literally the limit.

16 But this mid-twentieth-century futuristic fantasy was just that—a fantasy.

17 In 1940, Henry Ford predicted, “Mark my word: a combination airplane and motorcar is coming. You may smile, but it will come.” In the 1950s, Ford Motors tried to make good on this promise by building the Volante Tri-Athodyne, a 3/8-scale model, to show how a flying car might work. It went nowhere.



The details in paragraphs 11 through 17 support the key idea that —
A
the Volante Tri-Athodyne model was proof that flying cars were possible
B
the AirCar finally made the idea of flying cars into a reality
C
people who work from home probably have little need for flying cars
D
people have been anticipating flying cars for a long time

Answer 1

D

The paragraphs show examples (popular culture like The Jetsons, Gail Collins's comment, Henry Ford's prediction, and the 1950s Volante experiment) indicating that people have long anticipated flying cars.