阅读短文，判断正误。
Misunderstandings
A
man, wearing dirty clothes, with dirty hair and only 35 cents in his pocket,
got on a bus and headed straight for the restroom. He thought that if he hid in
the restroom, he could ride to New York without paying. But a passenger at the
back of the bus saw him. She tapped(拍)the person
in front of her on the shoulder and said, "There's a bum in the restroom.
Tell the bus driver. "That passenger tapped the person sitting in front of
him. "Tell the bus driver there's a bum in the restroom," he said.
The
message was passed from person to person until it reached the front of the bus.
But somewhere along the way, the message changed. By the time it reached the
bus driver, it was not "There's a bum in the restroom" but "There's
a bomb(炸弹)in the restroom. "The driver pulled over to the side of the
highway(高速公路)at once and called the police. When the
police arrived, they told the passengers to get off the bus and stay far away.
Then they closed the highway. That soon caused a 15-mile-long traffic jam. With
the help of a dog, the police searched the bus for two hours. Of course, they
found no bomb.
Two
similar-sounding English words also caused trouble for a man who wanted to fly
from Los Angeles to Oakland, California. His problems began at the airport in
Los Angeles. He thought he heard his flight announced, so he walked to the
gate, showed his ticket, and got on the plane. Twenty minutes after take-off,
the man began to worry. Oakland was north of Los Angeles, but the plane seemed to
be heading west, and when he looked out his window all he could see was ocean.
"Is this plane going to Oakland? "he asked the flight attendant.
"No, "she said. "We're going to Auckland-Auckland, New Zealand."
Because
so many English words sound similar, misunderstandings among English-speaking
people are not uncommon. Most misunderstandings are much less serious. Every
day, people speaking English ask one another questions like these: "Did
you say seventy or seventeen?" "Did you say that you can come or that
you can't?"
Similar-sounding words can be especially
confusing（混淆）for people who speak English as a
second language. When a Korean woman who lives in the United States arrived at
work one morning, her boss asked her, "Did you get a plate?" "No."
she answered, wondering what in the world he meant. She worked in an office.
Why did the boss ask her about a plate? All day she wondered about her boss's
strange question, but she was too embarrassed to ask him about it. At five
o'clock, when she was getting ready to go home, her boss said, "Please be
on time tomorrow.
You
were 15 minutes late this morning." "Sorry," she said. "My
car wouldn't start, and…"
Suddenly she stopped talking and began to
smile. Now she understood. Her boss hadn't asked her, "Did you get a
plate?" He had asked her, "Did you get up late?"
Auckland and Oakland. "A plate"
and" up late". When similar-sounding words cause a misunderstanding,
probably the best thing to do is just to laugh and learn from the mistake. Of
course, sometimes it's hard to laugh. The man who traveled to Auckland instead
of Oakland didn't feel like laughing. But even that misunderstanding turned out
all right in the end. The airline paid for the man's hotel room and meals in
New Zealand and for his flight back to California. "Oh well, "the man
later said. "I always wanted to see New Zealand."
