Ⅰ.阅读理解
(2022广东汕头三模)
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(零售的) encounters,like buying a bar of chocolate or a bottle of milk,from a corner 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 store—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 of an eye?Doesn’t a wallet—that time-honoured Friday-night feeling of pleasing,promising fatness—represent something that maters?
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 corners,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.
1.What does the author intend to show with the example of buying chocolate and milk?
A.Goods like chocolate and milk should be sold only in corner shops.
B.Now people seldom use cash unless making small purchases.
C.People won’t bother to buy daily groceries with cash.
D.The new generation no longer needs wallet.
2.What makes the author feel uncomfortable nowadays?
A.Spending money is so fast and easy.
B.Saving money is no longer necessary.
C.The pleasing Friday-night feeling is fading.
D.Earning money is getting more difficult.
3.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 unwilling to part with the traditional wallet.
D.He feels insecure in the ever changing modern world.
4.Which of the following is the best title for the passage?
A.Wallet:A Thing of the Past
B.Changes in Payment Trends
C.Cash No Longer Useful
D.Age of Wallet Coming to an End
