Question

People all over the world have some strange hobbies, and one of the most unusual in Britain is “trainspotting.” It's usually men over the age of 40, but not always. You'll see them standing around at railway stations and other places where trains pass by, and you'll see them taking photos and exchanging notes with each other. So, what are they doing?

Well, they're collecting information about trains — the numbers on the front of the trains, or the make and model of the“ locomotive (火车头)” —the part of the train which pulls all the other parts. In the same way that some people collect toys or stamps, these men collect and exchange all kinds of details about trains and railways.

The idea goes back as far as 1942. That year, a young man named Ian Allan was working at Waterloo rail-way station in London. It was his job to answer letters from people about trains, and quite a lot of the questions he received were very similar, so he had a word with his boss. He asked if he could write a booklet (小手册) giving the answers to the most frequently asked questions - an early version of the FAQs you see on websites nowadays. His boss said if he wanted to waste his time on such a project, he should do it in his own time.

So he did. The first 2,000 copies were all sold in days, and by the 1950s, a million copies of British Railways Locomotives were selling every year. Ian Allan went on to become a successful publisher, and got an Order of the British Empire (OBE,大英帝国勋章) from the Queen in 1995. He died in 2015, but his trainspotting hobby lives on.

1.What do trainspotters do?

A.They collect railway toys and stamps.

B.They observe the scenes at railway stations.

C.They gather and exchange details about trains.

D.They build and collect model trains based on photos.

2.When answering letters from people about trains, Iran Allan most probably felt________.

A.amazed B.impatient C.satisfied D.stressed

3.From the passage, we know that________.

A.his boss gave him a lot of help to publish his booklet.

B.his booklet wasn't popular when first introduced.

C.his work published in the 1950s is not popular anymore.

D.his project on train-related questions earned him great fame.

Answer 1