Section C
Directions: There are 2 passages in this section. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B),
C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on
Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
Passage One
Questions 46 to 50 are based on the following passage.
The wallet is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. The kind of shopping—where you hand over notes and count out change in return—now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters, like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk from a comer shop. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail stores—Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, for instance—you don’t go and stand at any kind of cash register when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.
Which is nothing more or less than excellent service, if you have the money. But across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. But earning money isn’t quick or easy for most of us. Isn’t it a bit weird that spending it should happen in half a blink (眨眼)of an eye? Doesn’t a wallet—that
time-honoured Friday-night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness—represent something that matters?
But I’ll leave the economics to the experts. What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment. Everything about the look and feel of a wallet—the way the fastenings and materials wear and tear and loosen with age, the plastic and paper and gold and silver, and handwritten phone numbers and printed cinema tickets—is the very opposite of what our world is becoming. The opposite of a wallet is a smartphone or an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as a pebble (鹅卵石). instead of digging through pieces of paper and peering into comers, we move our fingers left and right. No more counting out coins. show your wallet, if you still have one. It may not be here much longer.
36. What is happening to the wallet?
A) It is disappearing.
B) It is being fattened.
C) It is becoming costly,
D) It is changing in style.
37. How are business transactions done in big modern stores?
A) Individually.
B) Electronically.
C) In the abstract.
D) Via a cash register.
38. What makes the author feel uncomfortable nowadays?
A) Saving money is becoming a thing of the past.
B) The pleasing Friday-night feeling is fading.
C) Earning money is getting more difficult.
D) Spending money is so fast and easy.
39. Why does the author choose to write about what’s happening to the wallet?
A) It represents a change in the modem world.
B) It has something to do with everybody’s life.
C) It marks the end of a time-honoured tradition.
D) It is the concern of contemporary economists.
40. What can we infer from the passage about the author?
A) He is resistant to social changes.
B) He is against technological progress.
C) He feels reluctant to part with the traditional wallet.
D) He feels insecure in the ever-changing modem world.
答案解析：
36. 根据“The wallet is heading for extinction.”(钱包正走向灭绝)，可知钱包正在消失，所以选A。
37. 根据“At the most cutting - edge retail stores...The staff are equipped with iPads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.”(在最前沿的零售商店，当你决定付款时，不用去任何收银台，工作人员配备iPad在你坐在沙发上时收取款项)，可知在现代大商店里商业交易是通过电子方式完成的，所以选B。
38. 根据“But across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy...Isn’t it a bit weird that spending it should happen in half a blink (眨眼) of an eye?”(但在整个社会中，现金概念的抽象化让我感到不安。对我们大多数人来说，赚钱并不快也不容易。花钱在眨眼间就完成了，这难道不有点奇怪吗?)，可知花钱如此之快和容易让作者感到不舒服，所以选D。
39. 根据“What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment.”(钱包的消失让我烦恼的是它代表了我们物质环境的变化)以及后文对钱包和现代电子设备对比的描述，可知作者写钱包发生的事是因为它代表了现代世界的变化，所以选A。
40. 根据文中描述“Doesn’t a wallet—that time - honoured Friday - night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness—represent something that matters?”(钱包——那种历史悠久的周五晚上令人愉悦、充满希望的充实感——难道不代表一些重要的东西吗?)，可知作者对钱包消失所代表的变化感到不安，所以选D。
