Question

In the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and preparing for the worst, Australian adventurer Peter Seiter wrote a farewell note to his family, put it in a bottle and threw it overboard. With a sense of bad feeling he wrote: “The ocean has a personality of its own. The place can be such a peaceful environment to be in, yet it can be frightfully violent. I’ve experienced both.” Fearing he wouldn’t make it home, he placed the note -- dated June 11, 1998 -- in a wine bottle and covered the bottle.

“I included my geographical coordinates, so if anything happened to me, they’d know my last place when I threw the bottle into the ocean,” says Peter, who was then sailing from the Azores in Portugal to New York and knew the Atlantic could be dangerous. He also included some money with his message, asking whoever found it to use the money to post the letter to his family.

Seventeen days later he reached his destination, having survived the dangerous seas, but he assumed his message in the bottle had not -- until it was found on shore, 11 years later!

Recently, American woman Katherine Ginn and her friend came across the bottle on a deserted beach in the Bahamas. “Alongside it they’d found a life jacket and, assuming the worst, opened the bottle and spent 24 hours drying it out so they could read my story and write to my family as I requested,” says Peter, 44. “I couldn’t believe it -- that after all these years my bottle had turned up with its contents, still undamaged.”

Overjoyed, he wrote to the pair, saying he was alive and living in Australia with his family.

Katherine posted him his letter, money and some broken glass of his bottle placed in a tiny box as a special souvenir. These special items now share pride of place among photos of Peter’s Atlantic voyage. “I can’t express what this old letter means to me,” Peter says. “It gives me a sense of hope and belief. It’s something special to share with my children as they grow up.”

1. Why did Peter have the idea of a message bottle?

A. He missed his family very much then.

B. He hoped to share his experience with his family.

C. He regretted taking a risk on the ocean.

D. He thought he might lose his life on the voyage.

2.As for the survival of the message bottle, Peter ________.

A. felt very certain about it

B. thought it had little chance of reaching land

C. took a long time to search for it

D. wrote a letter to Katherine

3.What can be inferred about the message bottle according to Paragraph 3 and 4?

A. Katherine found it by chance on a crowded beach.

B. It was 11 years before they came across it at sea.

C. Perhaps there was water in it when Katherine found it.

D. Peter couldn’t believe more that it was not damaged.

4.From the passage, we can learn that ________.

A. this was Peter’s first voyage in the Atlantic

B. Peter spent eleven days in the Atlantic

C. without the life jacket, the bottle wouldn’t have survived

D. Katherine was a caring and careful person

Answer 1