Directions:
Read the text and study the chart on the following pages, then answer
the multiple-choice questions.
:
Select the best suggested answer to each question and write its number
in the space
provided
a) Most
techniques are too expensive to be used
often.
b)
Few techniques are appropriate for commercial
areas.
c) The
least expensive techniques are also the
least effective.
(d)
No single technique is correct for all situations.
Passage
I
He was a manufacturer’s agent in New Orleans and sold
printers’ ink. The
storeroom where he kept his supplies was in the old city, near the
Museum and
the old Cathedral. It is delightful to walk
in that part of the old city, just as
evening comes, when the light is uncertain.
5
I used to see him at work in the dark storehouse under an electric lamp
and
one evening I went in.
He was
making a
wooden model
of an American clipper ship and it was
lovely.
I asked him about it. This is the tale he told me. He was fifty-five.
His wife
10 was dead
and his children were married. He had never been a great success in
business. Once he made considerable money—but later.
He had got an agency—selling printers’ ink in New
Orleans.
In his younger
years he lived in a Northern city where men hustled more. In New
Orleans he
could take things easier. Rents were lower. He knew a good many small
printers.
15
They bought ink from him. Why
not? He sold good ink. The price was all right.
One day he was in the Museum where there are a good many rather fine
models of old ships. New Orleans is a seafaring town. In the old days
of sailing
ships a good many sailors used to carve such models of ships during
long voyages.
In the Museum there was a man from the state university of an interior
state.
20 He had
come to New Orleans to buy models of old ships but there were none to
be found. Nowadays they are picked up by curio dealers who buy them at
a high
price. The rich want them to put on library shelves above the books.
They are no
doubt made now in some factory.
The man from the interior was puzzled. Could a man be found who would
25
carve from models in the museum a few such ships?
The wholesale dealer in ink stepped forward.
“I’ll do it,” he said. He had
never carved anything but when he was a boy in Philadelphia he spent a
great
deal of time in the shipping [area]. At night, as a boy, he dreamed of
ships.
The man seeking ship models asked him how much he would charge.
“Thirty
30
dollars each. It will take me a long time. I won’t ask you to
pay me anything down.
When I have completed the models, if you do not like them, it will be
all right.”
The whole affair, the old man
told me, had been
foolish enough.He had
never used tools. Books concerning ships had to be bought. His hands
had to be
trained.
35
When I saw him he was completing the first model that satisfied him. It
was
the fourth one he had attempted and the first three had been burned.
“Will you do
others?” I
asked. “Surely,” he said. He worked every evening
from six until nearly midnight. He had never been so well, so
contented. “The
whole foolish business has cost me nearly two hundred dollars. It is
the only thing
40 I
ever did that gave me any real satisfaction,” he said.
— Sherwood Anderson
“Note 29”
from Sherwood Anderson’s Notebook, 1926
Boni & Liveright
[3]
[OVER]
Passage II
Assembler
My twentieth summer I got a job in Door Locks
at the Ford plant where my father has worked
for twenty years. Five in the morning
we’d stand tired in the glare and old heat
5
of the kitchen, my father fiddling with
the radio dial, looking for a clear station.
There weren’t any women in my department.
At first the men would ask me to lift
what I couldn’t, would speed up the turntable,
10
juggling the greasy washers and bolts,
winking at each other, grinning at me.
In the break room they would buy me coffee,
study my check to see if I got shorted.
They were glad I was in school and told me
15
to finish, they said I’d never regret it.
Once I got loaned to Air Conditioners,
worked three days in a special enclosure,
quiet and cool and my hands stayed clean.
Out the window I could see Door Locks,
20
the men taking salt pills, 110 degrees.
In rest rooms there were women sleeping
on orange vinyl couches, oven timers ticking
next to their heads.
At lunch I’d take the long walk to my father.
25
I’d see him from a distance, wearing safety glasses
like mine, and earphones, bright slivers of brass
in his hair—him standing alone in strange sulfur light
amidst machines the size of small buildings.
Every twenty minutes he worked a tumbler,
30 in between he read from his grocery bag of paperbacks.
He would pour us coffee from a hidden pot,
toast sandwiches on a furnace. We sat
on crates, shouting a few things and laughing
over the roar and banging of presses.
35
Mostly I remember the back-to-back heat waves,
coffee in paper cups that said Safety First,
my father and I hurrying away from the time clocks,
proud of each other. And my last day, moving shy past
their Good Lucks, out into 5:00, shading my eyes.
— Debra Allbery
from Walking Distance, 1991
University of Pittsburgh Press
[4]
a) demonstrate
courage
b) examine
a ship
c) purchase
ink
d) satisfy
his curiosity
a) business climate
b) coastal location
c) cheap labor
d) mild winter
a) feared
failure
b) disliked
the work.
c) lacked
experience
d) hated
change
a) flexibility
b) dedication
c) efficiency
d) cleverness
a) fame
b) fulfillment
c) profit
d) knowledge
a) symbol
b) rhyme
c) setting
d) metaphor
a) male
coworkers
b) self-doubt
c) supervisor
d)
poor work ethic
a) financial inexperience
b) concerned attitude
c) job satisfaction
d) unfriendly personalities
a) personification
b) chronology
c) simile
d) contrast
a) alienation
of the daughter
b) value
of reading
c) isolation
of the father
d) variety
of equipment