It is hard for one to foretell a winner in the popular “Tour de France”, the annual twenty-four-day bike race over twenty-five hundred miles of French Countryside. Anything can happen in this exhausting cycle race. It has been called the world’s roughest road race. Accidents and exhaustion may force more than half contestants to drop out before reaching the finish line. A cyclist can stay in crowd, finish respectably, and still suffer physical punishment. The real dangers of the race come near to those who decide to win. Cycling down a narrow, zigzag (蜿蜒曲折的) mountain road, a racer may cover sixty miles an hour with no hope of stopping; if he loses control then, he’s out of race in a second, thrown into a cliff or into a rocky ditch. But the reward for skillful and lucky winner is large—it’s possible for him to earn as much as a hundred thousand dollars a year.
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