If we tend to ignore the significance of elevators, it might be because riding in them tends to be such a brief, boring, and even awkward experience—one that can involve unexpectedly meeting people with whom we have nothing in common, and an unpleasant awareness of the fact that we're hanging from a cable in a long passage.

　　In a new book, Lifted, German journalist and cultural studies professor Andreas Bernard directed all his attention to this experience, studying the origins of elevator and its relationship to humankind and finding that riding in an elevator has never been a totally comfortable experience. “After 150 years, we are still not used to it，” Bernard said. “We still have not exactly learned to cope with the mixture of closeness and displeasure.” That mixture, according to Bernard, sets the elevator ride apart from just about every other situation we find ourselves in as we go about our lives.

　　Today, as the world's urban population explodes, and cities become more crowded, taller, and more crowded, America's total number of elevators—900,000 at last count, according to Elevator World magazine's “2017 Vertical Transportation Industry”—are a force that's becoming more important than ever. And for the people who really, really love them, it seems like high time that we looked seriously at just what kind of force they are.

　　29. What does the underlined word “this” in Paragraph 1 refer to?

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