The man traveling in the back of the ambulance which was running at a high speed along the streets of Baltimore that morning in2008 had no business to be alive. By everything that was reasonable, and there were plenty of such things before, he should have been very dead indeed. But he wasn't. As the people in the hospital pointed out after they had examined him, he was only slightly hurt. Yet he had just fallen 150 feet down a hotel lift shaft! Unknown to the man, two things had occurred which were to affect his life that day. On the thirteenth floor of the hotel, somebody had carelessly left the lift gate open. Down in the basement, a pipe had burst and it had flooded from the bottom of the lift shaft to a depth of two feet. Modern lifts have all sorts of fail-safe system to prevent accidents, but this was ancient equipment unreliable, slow, dangerous, and unsuitable material to recycle.     The man had plenty of things to occupy his mind that morning. He had overslept. The hotel had forgotten to call him and now he was late for an important business appointment. He dressed quickly, shaved hurriedly, took hold of his briefcase and hurried off down the hotel corridor.     Good! The lift gate was open. The lift must be there. He need not press the button and wait while the large, clumsy lift made its way upwards. Without looking or thinking, he stepped out into space, The lift cage was, in fact, one floor above him on the fourteenth. The lift shaft which he had walked was a narrow space of not very fresh air, ending150 feet below in two feet of dirty water. The man fell, making his journey to the ground at a speed he had never dreamed of. Confused patterns, a rush of air, time enough to be afraid, split-second thoughts of death, then crash! Perhaps this gave him the record for some sort of high-diving act. No doubt in future he always looked before he jumped. Certainly he learnt that this was no way to save time. The experts said that those two feet of water had saved his life. By "... had no business to be alive", the writer means that the man  _  .
had missed his business appointment was alive with excitement was alive and this was surprising didn't do any business