Have you ever wanted to visit a faraway place but can’t because it takes too long to get there? Someday soon you may be able to get there faster. A company called Space X is working on exactly that. The trip from New York to London takes about seven and a half hours by plane. Space X wants to fly rockets that will make the same trip in only 29 minutes.
Saving time when traveling has always been important to humans. The distance from Taipei to Kaohsiung is 361 km. That would take days on foot! Taking a car, bus or regular train will get you there in about four hours. The HSR (high speed rail) can do it in only one and a half hours! That means you have more time to do other things, like explore the city. Imagine the extra time you would have if you could take a rocket!
Even though getting to new places in a rocket would be very convenient, there are some problems too. The technology for a passenger rocket can look a lot like the same rockets that countries use to attack each other. Some people are worried it will be difficult to tell the difference between an intercontinental ballistic missile (IBM) and a passenger rocket.
Traveling by rocket may not be very comfortable. Rockets speed up very quickly, making some people sick.
火箭之旅也許會很不舒適。火箭加速極快，這會讓乘客感到身體不舒服。
不一定省時
It takes time to get everyone on and off of a train or plane. Some people think it will take even longer for rocket ship passengers. That means for some trips, it might not be faster than a regular airplane.
Rocket fuel is like gasoline for a car—it burns and leaves behind things that pollute our air.
火箭燃料就像汽車行駛需要汽油，燃料燃燒後，殘留的物質會汙染空氣。
票價昂貴
Sure, these rockets may be fast and cool, but how much are the tickets? Flying in an airplane from Taipei to Los Angeles costs thousands of dollars. The same trip could cost much, much more than that!
Space X is working on taking you to the other side of the world. In the future, they even want to fly passengers to the moon and build a city on Mars. In the meantime, they recently helped Taiwan. In August this year, Space X used their Falcon 9 rocket to launch Taiwan’s first homegrown satellite into space, the Formosat-5.
Space X正在研發地球上的火箭之旅，未來，甚至還可用火箭載客到月球，或到火星建造城市。Space X最近也協助臺灣，今年八月該公司的「獵鷹九號」火箭，將臺灣第一枚自主製造的「福衛五號」衛星，發射到太空裡。
道地說英語
skyrocket（像火箭一樣）一飛沖天
If something becomes very popular quickly, like those fidget spinners did, we might say that it skyrocketed. You might hear adults talk about the prices of things skyrocketing, or going up quickly.
PROCEDURAL BILL: Legislator Hsu Yung-ming said the DPP had described the referendum amendments as a procedural bill, so they could not possibly limit content
By Chen Wei-han / Staff reporter
The New Power Party （NPP） yesterday put forward six referendum topics regarding sovereignty and labor rights, including sensitive proposals dealing with the nation’s territory and official name, and said it would conduct an online poll to decide which two of the six topics the party should advocate to propose for a referendum.
Four of the topics fall within the category of sovereignty: whether the president should convene a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to draft a new constitution, which would need to be approved by referendum; whether Taiwan should seek to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics under the name “Taiwan”; whether the government should define the country’s territory as “Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other islets”; and whether the English name “Republic of China” should be removed from Taiwanese passports.
In the labor rights category, the party proposed two questions: whether the Legislative Yuan should pass a “national holiday act” to ensure a minimum of 19 national holidays each year for public and private employees and whether it should pass a “minimum wage act” that guarantees the minimum income needed to sustain the basic living needs of employees and their families.
The NPP invited the public to vote on the six proposals on its Web site from yesterday to Thursday, saying it would initiate the referendum process for the most favored topic in each of the two categories and expects to submit the two referendum proposals to the Central Election Commission next month at the earliest.
The NPP’s proposals followed the passage of an amendment to the Referendum Act （公民投票法） that lowers the thresholds for initiating, seconding and passing referendums.
“[The proposal] to establish a ‘citizens’ constitutional convention’ is in line with the essence of Sunflower movement, which called for a convention to draft a constitution appropriate to Taiwan through a bottom-up decisionmaking process,” NPP Executive Chairman Huang Kuo-chang （黃國昌） said
Redefining the nation’s territory is crucial to help Taiwan assert its sovereignty and would have a positive effect on policymaking and budgeting, Huang said.
The NPP’s proposals have been criticized as being in conflict with the amendment, which rules out territorial changes and constitutional amendments as viable referendum topics.
Huang said that even though the party would touch on the issue of the nation’s territory and official name, none of the issues would require any changes to the Constitution.
The Democratic Progressive Party described the act as a procedural bill regulating how referendum processes should be carried out, not what topics the public can vote on, Huang said, adding that the NPP believes the public has the right to vote on the six topics.
“How could a purely procedural bill deprive citizens of the power to vote on those issues?” NPP Legislator Hsu Yung-ming （徐永明） said, calling on the commission to uphold the values of democracy when the NPP initiates the referendum processes.
While same-sex marriage opponents have reportedly planned to launch a referendum on the issue, Huang said that basic human rights cannot be put to vote and a referendum could not override the constitutional interpretation in May that found the statutory ban on same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, Huang said.
