Read the following paragraphs to answer the next five questions (questions 37 - 41).
one of the modern world's intriguing sources of mystery has been aeroplanes vanishing in mid-flight.
one of the more famous of these was the disappearance in 1937 of a pioneer woman aviator, amelia
earhart. on the second last stage of an attempted round the world flight, she had radioed her position
as she and her navigator searched desperately for their destination, a tiny island in the pacific.
the plane never arrived at howland island. did it crash and sink after running out of fuel? it had been
a long haul from new guinea, a twenty hour flight covering some four thousand kilometres. did earhart
have enough fuel to set down on some other island on her radioed course? or did she end up
somewhere else altogether? one fanciful theory had her being captured by the japanese in the
marshall islands and later executed as an american spy; another had her living out her days under an
assumed name as a housewife in new jersey.
seventy years after earhart's disappearance, 'myth busters' continue to search for her. she was the
best-known american woman pilot in the world. people were tracking her flight with great interest
when, suddenly, she vanished into thin air. aircraft had developed rapidly in sophistication after
world war one, with the 1920s and 1930s marked by an aeronautical record-setting frenzy.
conquest of the air had become a global obsession. while earhart was making headlines with her
solo flights, other aviators like high-altitude pioneer wiley post and industrialist howard hughes
were grabbing some glory of their own. but only earhart, the reserved tomboy from kansas who
disappeared three weeks shy of her 40th birthday, still grips the public imagination. her
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