Question

With a good shopping position and the right amount（数量）of money , any educated person ought to be able to make a living out of a bookshop . It is not a difficult trade to learn and the large chain-stores can never force the small bookseller out of existence as they have done to the corner shop . But the hours of work are very long-I was only doing a part-time job , but my boss put in a seventy-hour week ,besides regular journeys out of shopping hours to buy books .

       The real reason why I should not like to be back in the book trade for life , however , is that while I was in it I lost my love of books . A bookseller cannot always tell the truth about his books , and that gives him a dislike for them . There was a time when I really did love books-loved the sight and smell and feel of them-if they were fifty or more years old , that is . Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a bargain lot of them on sale for several pounds . There is a peculiar flavour（独特的味道）about the unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: little-known eighteenth-century poets , or out-of-date geography books . For occasional（偶尔的）reading-in your bath , for example , or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed-there is nothing as good as a very old picture story-book .

       But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books . Seen in a mass . five or ten thousand at a time , books were dull and even a little tiresome . Nowadays I do buy one occasionally , but only if it is a book that I want to read and can’t borrow , and I never buy rubbish .

1 According to the passage ,       is one of the necessary conditions to run a bookshop .

A. an educated shop-owner                           B. a good position at a street corner

C. a regular journey out of the shop               D. the force of large chain-stores

2 The author should not like to be back as a bookseller for life because       .

A. he hated his job of selling books      

B. selling books was only a part-time job

C. the books in the shop gave him a dislike

D. he was unable to be honest about the books he sold

3 The books preferred by the author should be those       .

A. stories making readers sleepless           

B. valuable ones bought on sale

C. peculiar ones with great expectation        

D. geography ones from the eighteenth century

4 The author will only buy new books       .

A. if he feels dull and tired              

B. after he gives up his job as a bookseller

C. which are interesting but hard to borrow 

D. when he throws away old ones

Answer 1

1.A  2.D  3.B  4.C