题目内容：

Swimming in an ocean of stars

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It’s my great honor to receive the Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. Thank you.

I started writing sci-fi because I looked for a way to escape the dull life, and to reach out, with imagination, to the mysterious time and space that I could never truly reach. But then I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up. Future is like pouring rain. It reaches us even before we have time to open the umbrella. Meanwhile, when sci-fi becomes reality, it loses all its magic, and that frustrates me. Sci-fi will soon become part of our lives. The only thing I can do, is to push my imagination further to even more distant time and space to hunt for the mysteries of sci-fi. As a sci-fi author, I think my job is to write things down before they get really boring.

This being said, the world is moving in the direction opposite to Clarke’s predictions. In 2001, A Space Odyssey, in the year of 2001, which has already passed, human beings have built magnificent cities in space, and established permanent colonies on the moon, and huge nuclear-powered spacecraft have sailed to Saturn. However, today, in 2018, the walk on the moon has become a distant memory. And the furthest reach of our manned space flights is just as long as the two-hour mileage of a high-speed train passing through my city.

As a sci-fi writer, I have been striving to continue Arthur Clarke’s imagination. I believe that the boundless space is still the best direction and destination for human imagination. I have always written about the magnitude and mysteries of the universe, interstellar expeditions, and the lives and civilizations happening in distant worlds. This remains today, although this may seem childish or even outdated. It says on Arthur Clarke’s epitaph,“He never grew up, but he never stopped growing.”

Many people misunderstand sci-fi as trying to predict the future, but this is not true. It just makes a list of possibilities of what may happen in the future, like displaying a pile of cobblestones for people to see and play with. Science fiction can never tell which scenario of the future will actually become the real future. This is not its job. It’s also beyond its capabilities. But one thing is certain: in the long run, for all these countless possible futures, any future without space travel is gloomy, no matter how prosperous our own planet becomes.

Sci-fi was writing about the age of digital information and it eventually became true. I now look forward to the time when space travel finally becomes the ordinary. By then, Mars and the asteroid belts will be boring places and countless people are building a home over there. Jupiter and its many satellites will be tourist attractions. The only obstacle preventing people from going there for good, will be the crazy price.

But even at that time, the universe is still unimaginably big that even our wildest imagination fails to catch its edge. And even the closest star remains out of reach. The vast ocean of stars can always carry our infinite imagination.

Thank you all.

1.What does the writer mean by the underlined sentence in the second paragraph?

A.Science technology has been developing fast before we realize it.

B.What happened in our life was mysterious and beyond our imagination.

C.We had a good outlook for the future and were desperate to realize our dream.

D.We managed to escape from the boring life and looked forward to the prosperous future.

2.What can we learn from the third paragraph?

A.What Clarke foresaw is childish and out of date, going against scientific theories.

B.It is feasible for human beings to fulfill challenging space missions that Clarke forecast.

C.Human beings have deserted imaging and exploring the attractive and boundless space.

D.Clarke’s predictions haven’t happened in real life and the reality won’t change very soon.

3.According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?

A.What is written in science fiction can never become a reality.

B.The writer considers it his duty to create sci-fi with author Clarke.

C.Science fiction provides readers with possibilities that future will bring about.

D.High price will likely stop humans from dreaming of living on other planets.

4.What’s the writer’s attitude towards sci-fi creation?

A.Curious B.Passionate

C.Concerned D.Suspicious