There’s never been any mystery about why the world’s most famous luxury liner plunged to the bottom of the frigid NorthAtlantic on a moonless night during its maiden voyage almost exactly a century ago. The ___(11)___ was a block of ice—amassive berg that had calved away from Greenland and drifted down into the heavily traveled shipping lanes. On April 15, 1912,the unsinkable Titanic met the unmovable iceberg and in less than three hours, the ship was no more, taking 1500 passengers andcrew members down with it.
      That’s the direct cause of the tragedy anyway, but there were plenty of contributing factors—a poor ship design, a wrongdecision by the captain to ___(12)___ ahead at high speed and a push by the ship company’s managing director to make thecrossing in record time for bragging rights. There may, however, have been an ___(13)___ co-conspirator, one that’s goneoverlooked for all these decades: the moon. That conclusion doesn’t come from astrologers finding dark ___(14)___ in the starcharts of 1912, but from two physicists from Texas State University.
      Donald Olson and Russell Doescher began with a(n) ___(15)___ convergence months before the Titanic set sail. On thatday, the sun and the moon lined up with the earth in such a way that their combined gravity led to a cycle of unusually high andlow tides. By itself, the phenomenon is not that uncommon. But in 1912, the spring tides were special. At almost exactly the sametime they were occurring, the scientists determined, the moon just happened to make its closest approach to the earth in 1,400years. The moon’s orbit is slightly oval, so it ___(16)___ between closer and farther away every month; but there’s a slightwobble on top of that so that on occasion, close becomes extremely close and far becomes very far—at least by earth-moonstandards. In 1912, the unusual propinquity of the moon made its gravitational pull just a little more powerful than normal.
      Worse still, on Jan. 3—only one day earlier—the earth made its closest approach to the sun, which happens every year atthis time. That meant that solar gravity was stronger than usual too. ___(17)___ all of this would converge at precisely the right(or wrong) moment in the moon’s monthly procession around the earth impressed even the scientists.
      So the tides on Jan. 4 were not just high, but higher than they’d been in many hundreds of years. At first the physicistssurmised that the rising sea might have forced extra icebergs to break off from Greenland, and indeed that ___(18)___. But to getinto the shipping lanes by April, any fresh floes would have had to swim against the prevailing currents, which would have beenimpossible. ___(19)___, the new theory suggests, the killer berg might have been an old one that had become grounded in therelatively shallow waters around Labrador and Newfoundland. Icebergs often run aground there, but the historically high tidesmay have freed a number of them, turning the shipping lanes into the deadly minefield they became that April.
      It’s an ingenious piece of detective work, and it could well be right—although it can’t ever be proved ___(20)___. AdmitsOlson: “We don’t claim to know exactly where the Titanic iceberg was in January 1912—nobody can know that—but this is aplausible scenario intended to be scientifically reasonable.”
【題組】11.
(A) smoking gun
(B) common denominator
(C) feet of clay
(D) Trojan horse