Wonders Of The Modern World

The Petronas Towers

# The Petronas Towers are located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia # The Petronas Towers are located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. # The towers have a height of 1483 feet and have 88 floors each. The two towers are joined by a flexible skybridge on the 42nd floor. # Each tower’s floor plan is designed in the shape of a 8-pointed star, according to the traditional Malaysian patterns. # The towers have more than 8 million sq feet of shopping and entertainment facilities, underground parking for 4500 cars, a petroleum museum, a symphony hall, a mosque and a multimedia conference centre. # The amazing fact is that it takes only 90 seconds to reach from the basement parking lot to the top of each tower. # In total, the two towers have 32,000 windows.

Mount Rushmore Memorial

# Mount Rushmore Memorial is located in Keystone, South Dakota, U.S.A. It was built in the Black Hills as a national memorial. It is a tribute to the birth, growth, preservation and development of the United States. # The structure is created by Gutzmon Borglum and features 60-feet high stone carvings of the faces of four great American presidents- George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. # The faces were carved out of the mountain sides with the help of explosives and drills. With the help of 400 workers, Borglum started the work of drilling in the 6200 feet mountain in 1927. # By 1941, the task of carving Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln was completed but he died. Then, his son, Lincoln took up the incomplete project and completed carving Roosevelt’s face. # Though the original design was meant to sculpt the 4 presidents till their waists, but time and money could only accommodate for the carving of their heads.

Hoover Dam

# The Hoover Dam is located in the Black Canyon on the Arizona -Nevada border in U.S.A. It is one of the biggest dams in the world. # In 1931, 8000 workers began work on this dam to tame the Colorado river. # Before the dam was to be built, workers had to divert the river away from the construction site by blasting huge tunnels through the canyon walls. The task was completed in 1936. # The concrete they used to build the dam would have built a 4 feet wide footpath along the equator around the world. # It is a curved dam-as thick as 2 football fields and 726 feet tall. # Its reservoir can hold 1.24 trillion cubic feet of water and generates more than 4 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, enough for 13 lakh homes.

Golden Gate Bridge

# The Golden Gate Bridge lies between San Francisco and Sausalito, California, U.S.A. # Today, it is considered as one of the most marvelous bridges in the world, but when it was made a century ago, it was considered as an impossible task to build it. # The 2.7 km long suspension bridge was to be built in a location notorious for ferocious winds, turbulent tides, dense fog and just 8 miles away from the epicenter of one of the most destructing earthquakes. # However, an engineer, John Strauss took up the project. He used more than a million tons of concrete and plenty of steel wire to build the structure. # The northern pier that supports the bridge was built on a rock ledge 20 feet below water and the southern pier in the open ocean, 100 feet below the surface. # This bridge was opened to the public in 1937.

Sydney Opera House

# Sydney Opera House is located in Sydney, Australia # Sydney Opera House is located in Sydney, Australia. # It is an architectural masterpiece and is one of the great performing art centers of the world. # Around 3000 events and performances are staged each year in 5 venues and has an audience of over 2 million people. # Jorn Utzon, a Danish architect, won a competition to design the opera house in 1955. # He designed a complex with two theaters placed side by side on a podium. These were covered by concrete shells that interlocked, acting as both wall and roof. # However, as plenty of hurdles and controversies were cropping up, Utzon resigned from the project in 1966. # It was then completed by other architects and officially opened in 1973.

The long and the short route The Suez Canal The canal The long and the short route

# The Suez Canal is located in Egypt # The Suez Canal is located in Egypt. It is a 163 km long canal for ships sailing between Port Said on the Mediterranean Sea and Suez on the Red Sea. # This canal allows ships to travel from Europe to Asia without having to go around Africa. # In 1859, the work was begun by a French company led by Ferdinand de Lesseps and it took 10 years to complete it. It was jointly owned by Europe and France. # It is said that around 15 lakh Egyptians worked on the canal out of which 1,25,000 died in the process. # After the Suez war in the 50’s and the Six Day war in 1967, it remained closed till 1975. Later on, the U.N. handed over its ownership to Egypt. # The Suez Canal has no locks as there is no difference in the level of the two seas it connects. More than 14,000 ships pass through this canal every year.

The Chunnel The train coming out of the tunnel The map

# The Chunnel operates between Folkestone, England and Sangatte, France. # In the 1980’s , engineers of England and France got together to find a solution to create a direct route between the two countries. # They decided to construct a tunnel, around 50 km long, beneath the English Channel. The work began in 1988. # They came across many challenges, to build the tunnel as well as to convince the people to travel in the Chunnel assuring their safety. # In 1994, people started travelling in this tunnel and made it popular gradually. # The Chunnel is 1,63,680 feet long and has three tunnels, two train tunnels and one service tunnel which also acts as an exit route in case of emergencies. # Today, trains travel through the tunnels at 160 km/hr and it is possible to travel from England to France in 20 minutes flat.