Read the following passage carefully before choosing your answer.
Marcus stood before the double-paned glass of the executive boardroom, looking down at the shipyard where the colossal *Titan* lay docked. The ship’s automated navigation system, the Triton-9, was a marvel of modern engineering, yet the diagnostic logs on Marcus’s tablet revealed a fatal vulnerability. To report the defect meant halting the launch, a decision that would plunge the shipping syndicate into immediate, ruinous bankruptcy and strip hundreds of dockworkers of their livelihoods. To remain silent, however, was to permit a vessel with a compromised core to sail into the volatile winter currents of the North Atlantic—a choice that practically guaranteed a catastrophic wreck at sea.
Behind him, Director Sterling poured two glasses of amber liquid, the ice clinking with a cold, rhythmic finality. "Every voyage requires its toll, Marcus," Sterling said, his voice flat, devoid of the anxiety that currently gripped Marcus's chest. "We cannot alter the course of the company for the sake of a theoretical anomaly in the system. The waters we navigate are treacherous enough without us deliberately steering into the rocks of financial collapse."
Marcus looked back at the tablet. He felt the weight of two monsters looming on either side of his path: on his left, the immediate, devouring jaws of public scandal and professional ruin; on his right, the swirling, silent whirlpool of moral complicity and future disaster. There was no safe passage between them, no middle channel through which he could guide his conscience unscathed. The ancient mariners had names for such straits, where avoiding one predator meant drifting directly into the teeth of another. He realized then that Sterling had already made his peace with the sacrifice. The director was willing to feed a few sailors to the sea to keep the ship of state afloat. Marcus, however, was the one holding the steering oar, and the cliffs were rapidly drawing near.
In the final paragraph, the allusion to the "ancient mariners" and their "straits" serves primarily to do which of the following?
- highlight the inescapable and equally destructive nature of the dilemmas confronting Marcus.Cevap
- Bsummarize the literal nautical hazards associated with navigating the winter waters of the North Atlantic.
- Cindicate that Marcus is longing for a simpler, historical era of maritime exploration.
- Dcontrast Marcus’s lack of professional experience with Director Sterling’s seasoned leadership.
- Eassert the author's belief that modern automation is morally superior to traditional sailing methods.