Reading 2
          Hagan Walker contemplated the geography of the planet and felt pangs of agitation. The vastness of thePacific Ocean seemed to be stretching wider.
          His start-up company, Glo, makes novelty items — plastic cubes that light up when dropped in water.He started the business six years ago in the compact town of Starkville, Miss., while relying on factories 8,000 miles away in China to make his products. That distance suddenly felt unbridgeable.
         It was December 2020, nearly a year into the pandemic, and China’s industrial might was sputtering.The factory making Glo’s next order in the Chinese city of Ningbo warned him that the costs of keymaterials like plastic were soaring. The shipping industry was straining under an overwhelming flow ofgoods from Chinese plants to American consumers. Booking a shipping container seemed akin to trying tocatch a unicorn. Calm and reserved, Mr. Walker, then 28, was generally comfortable with risk.
         In 2016, fresh from Mississippi State University with an engineering degree, he turned down a job atTesla that would have paid him $130,000 a year. Instead, he opted to remain in Starkville, his college town,to start his own business. Yet he was increasingly worried that his next order would not make it to hiswarehouse in Mississippi in time for Christmas — still a year away. “I was scared,” Mr. Walker said matterof-factly. “I was willing to pay pretty much whatever.”          By now, the disruptions to the supply chain are widely known. The still unfolding turmoil has been amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along with fresh COVID lockdowns imposed in China. Yet the story of how a single container made it from coastal China to central Mississippi shows the complexity of the troubles — a condition unlikely to give way to normalcy anytime soon.
         The order that Mr. Walker placed for the Christmas season just past was the most important in Glo’s brief history. His light-up cubes had begun as a playful way to garnish a cocktail. They had since evolved into the glowing midsection for a variety of children’s bath toys. The company had recently forged ties with a giant in children’s education and entertainment — Sesame Street. This order represented the debut offerings of this partnership. Glo was to produce thousands of light-up dolls in the incarnation of Elmo, the Sesame Street icon, plus thousands more for a new character named Julia.

【題組】36. “The vastness of the Pacific Ocean seemed to be stretching wider” may imply that
(A) the factories producing his products are 8,000 miles away in China.
(B) the distance is traversable.
(C) the ordered products might not arrive in time.
(D) there will be a sputter of gunfire.