Multiple-choice cloze
For questions 1-8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap.
When a converted oil tanker called the Ideal X left Newark for Houston in April 1956 with fifty-eight metal boxes on its deck, few observers its significance. The man behind the voyage, a trucking entrepreneur named Malcolm McLean, had grown tired of watching his lorries wait for hours at the docks while cargo was unloaded by hand, sack by sack and crate by crate. His solution was disarmingly simple: rather than goods individually, why not seal them in standard boxes that could be lifted straight from a lorry onto a ship? The idea met resistance. Dockworkers, rightly fearing for their jobs, opposed it fiercely, and many ports were reluctant to invest in the enormous cranes the system required. Yet the economic arguments in its were overwhelming, and the container soon proved impossible to resist. Loading times fell from days to hours, theft, once in the docks, dropped sharply, and the cost of shipping goods across oceans fell so far that it ceased to be a significant in decisions about where things were made. In this sense, the humble steel box did as much as any trade agreement to the globalised economy we know today. It is a striking of how a modest practical innovation can transform the world.
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