대구외고 2학년 기말고사 대비(The Rush for White Gold-4)

[12~22] 다음 글을 읽고, 물음에 답하시오.

[E] It takes a day to drive from the world’s highest capital city to the world’s largest salt flat. The route passes steadily downhill through small villages, until leveling out, at about 3,600 meters, into a mostly vacant stretch of land occasionally animated by llamas. By late afternoon, the salt flat can be seen across the plain.

[F] I reach the Salar—Spanish for “salt flat”—just before sunset, and for over a kilometer I drive along its smooth and firm surface until it becomes evident that this is the middle of nowhere. The spectacle seems unreal: kilometers of whitewashed level terrain, its starkness perfected by the cloudless blue sky and the Andean peaks in the distance. Motorcycles and 4x4s drive across the roadless surface, destinations unknown. Here and there solitary people wander about, gazing into what the Bolivian vice president calls “the infinite table of snowy white.”

[G] Somewhere out of sight on infinity’s edge, bulldozers are plowing evaporation pools in the Salar—long and precise excavations, like a grid of enormous swimming pools. The bulldozers will be moving this way soon—how soon, no one can say with any certainty.

[H] Here is what we do know. First, that underneath the world’s biggest salt flat lies another wonder: one of the world’s greatest lithium deposits—perhaps 17 percent of the planet’s total. Second, that by exploiting its lithium reserves, the government of Bolivia—where 40 percent of the people live in poverty—envisions a pathway out of its economic misfortune.

[I] The salt flat had long been regarded by Bolivians as little more than geographical anomaly. While surrounding mountains are celebrated in indigenous stories, “the Salar has never had cultural significance,” says Uyuni’s mayor, Patricio Mendoza. “People were afraid that if they took a walk on it, they might get lost and die of thirst of their llamas would damage their hoovers on the salt.”

[J] The Salar’s fortunes changed in the 1980s, when a La Paz tour operator named Juan Quesada Valda laid eyes on it. Quesada was searching for a tourist destination to rival Lake Titicaca. When he beheld the Salar, he experienced a revelation, recalls his daughter Lucia: “You can find lakes anywhere,” she says, “but you cannot find a salt flat like this anywhere else in the world. He knew he could sell this place.”

[K] An architect by training, Quesada proceeded to build the first of several hotels made almost entirely out of blocks of salt in Colchani, a village at the eastern edge of the Salar. Adventurous foreigners began to show up to bask in the great pale desert. Weddings, yoga lessons, and automobile races would eventually be staged on it. Today the salt hotels are typically full and Uyuni has become a vacationland bustling with college-age-backpackers.
[L] “Maybe 90 percent of our economy is tourism,” Mendoza says. All of which is to say that in Bolivia’s morose history of economic disappointments, the Salar provides a happy if modest exception. But now comes Bolivia’s future, in the form of lithium.