Exercise 48 Look through the texts. Make up 4 questions to each and let your partners answer them.

Supplementary Text A

Four Eurasian Corridors

The full four-corridor Trans-Asian Railway (TAR) network is now being developed which aims to provide a continuous 14,000km rail link between Singapore and Istanbul, Turkey, with possible further connections to Europe and Africa.

TAR routes in operation today cover 80,900km distributed as follows:

· Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam), 12,600km

· Northeast Asia (China, Korea, Mongolia, North Korea, and the Russian Federation), 32,500km

· Central Asia and Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan) 13,200km, and

· South Asia (Bangladesh, India, Iran, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey) 22,600km.

The biggest challenge apart from providing the missing links is the four different rail gauges across Eurasia. Turkey, Iran, China, and two Koreas, and most of Europe use the 1435mm standard gauge; Finland, Russia, and the former Soviet republics use 1520mm gauge; most of the railways of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka use 1676mm gauge, while most of Southeast Asia operates on metre-gauge tracks.

In the northern corridor, for example, there are breaks of gauge at the Polish-Belarusian border (1435mm to 1520mm), the Kazakhstan-China border (1520mm to 1435mm), and the Mongolian-Chinese border (1520mm to 1435mm). Others include the Iran-Pakistan, India-Myanmar, and Thailand-China borders.

Supplementary Text B

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