Reading: Sentence Completion: Question 4

Long before the telephone made instant communication commonplace, several major cities experimented with a different technology to speed up urgent written messages: networks of pneumatic tubes buried beneath the streets. The system relied on a simple principle: a cylindrical carrier containing a paper message was inserted into a tube, and compressed air, generated by steam-powered pumping stations, propelled the carrier through the network to its destination at speeds that could exceed thirty kilometres per hour.

Paris opened the most extensive of these networks in 1866, eventually linking hundreds of post offices across the city with tubes that carried a distinctive lightweight paper form known as a pneumatique, sold specifically for use in the system. Messages sent by pneumatique were popular with journalists, stockbrokers and anyone needing to relay time-sensitive information faster than a horse-drawn messenger could manage, and the network remained in continuous operation for over a century, finally closing in 1984 after telex machines and telephones had made it largely redundant.

New York City built a rival network primarily to move mail between post offices rather than private messages between individuals; its tubes, roughly twenty centimetres in diameter, could send a canister containing around six hundred letters between stations in a matter of minutes, a volume no team of human runners could match. Postal workers nicknamed the pressurised carriers rockets because of the distinctive hissing sound the compressed air made as a canister rushed through the tube.

Pneumatic networks eventually declined everywhere for broadly similar reasons: the underground tubes were expensive to maintain, prone to blockages when a canister jammed partway along a route, and increasingly outcompeted by electronic communication that required no physical object to be moved at all. A handful of surviving tube segments have since found new uses; several hospitals still use short pneumatic systems today to send blood samples and small packages quickly between departments, a modest echo of the elaborate citywide systems that once linked entire capitals.

Complete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

1. The Paris pneumatic tube network opened in ____________________.
2. Messages sent through the Paris system were written on a special lightweight paper form called a ____________________.
3. The Paris network finally closed in ____________________ after telex machines and telephones made it redundant.
4. New York's pneumatic tubes were roughly ____________________ in diameter.
5. A single canister in the New York system could carry around ____________________ letters between stations.
6. Postal workers nicknamed the pressurised canisters ____________________ because of the hissing sound made by the compressed air.
7. Today, some hospitals still use short pneumatic systems to send small packages and ____________________ quickly between departments.