阅读理解 Section C Passage One Questions 56 to 60 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 of an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as 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.

单选题 What is happening to the wallet?

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】此题难度不大，根据题干中的“Silicon Valley”可定位第一段，第一段尾句“is there something unique about it?”直接把答案引向第二段。精读第二段“it wouldn’t be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in othercountries”，可知该句与A选项“Its success is hard to copy anywhere else.”为同义替换关系，故选A，其他三项均为无中生有。

单选题 How are business transactions done in big modern stores?

单选题 What makes the author feel uncomfortable nowadays?

【正确答案】 A

【答案解析】根据题干中的“Carnegie-Mellon”和“Stanford”，“Berkeley”，“MIT”容易定位到原文第六段，第六段段位抛出问题，所以顺势往第七段找答案。第七段中详细描述了卡内基梅隆大学所在的匹兹堡的不同之处：“The weather is terrible”，“rich people don’t want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca”，这些信息都指向了A选项，为高度概括关系。

单选题 Why does the author choose to write about what’s happening to the wallet?

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】根据题干中的“Boston”可定位至原文的第七段。原文提到Boston的句子为“as there is in Boston”，as在这里表对比，意为“波士顿却有”，那么前文一定指出了匹兹堡没有某物，所以关键句在于具体是什么，故往前文查找，发现前文提到的是“and there’s no interesting old city to make up for it”，意思是匹兹堡不仅天气恶劣，而且也没有有趣的老城区，但是波士顿却与之相反，固选择D，表示“波士顿有着很多历史古迹”。