Read the paragraph from “Rivers and Stories,” Part 1.
It’s also a fact of the twentieth century that as a mode of travel, for commerce and pleasure, rivers have been largely displaced by highways, railways, and air travel. A hundred and fifty years ago the epic stories of engineering had to do with canal building, connecting one river system or one sea with another: Panama and Suez. The locks of the Erie Canal and the extensive lock system of English rivers belong now to a quaint and minor tourism. The stories of the twentieth century have had to do with massive dams, with nationalism and economic development and the prestige of massive dams. Rivers now supply 20 percent of the world’s electrical power, most of it generated by large, ecologically destructive, often culturally destructive, dams. The still-to-be-completed Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze is only the latest in a series of Faustian bargains technological culture has struck with the rivers of the earth.
What is the author’s perspective in this paragraph?
1. Tourism is helping to revive the legends associated with rivers.
2. Rivers are still the best way to transport people and products from one place to another.
3. Technological advancements have strengthened the ways people view rivers.
4. Human activity has changed the purpose of rivers for the worse.
