阅读理解

One of the most authoritative voices speaking to us today is, of course, the voice of the advertisers. Its shrilling clamor dominates our lives. It shouts at us from the television screens and the radio loudspeakers; waves to us from every page of the newspaper; plucks at our sleeves on the escalator; signals to us from the road-side billboards all day and flashes messages to us in colored lights at night.

Advertising has been among England’s biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrate achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure?

Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer appeal to all his other problems of man- hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go ahead and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they finish it, by pretending that it gives status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover.

Other manufacturers find advertising saves them from changing their product. And manufacturers hate change. The ideal product is or another, some alteration seems called for how much better to change the image, the packet or the pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.

单选题 According to the passage modern advertising becomes one of the most prosperous industries because _____.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】分析题干可知， 问题询问的是为什么当代的广告业能够异军突起的原因。 文章第一段详细描绘了当下无孔不入的广告宣传， 第二段直接指出在英格兰， 战后广告业的发展速度超过了其他所有的行业。 第三段的关键词“answer”进一步阐述广告业的诞生可以让制造商花费心思如何吸引顾客。 正是这一需求， 带动了广告业的发展。 由此可见， B选项才是解释广告业发展的重要原因。 A， D选项均未提及， C选项只是在重述广告业势头正盛这一事实。
单选题 The forms of advertising mentioned in paragraph 1 would have least impact _____.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】文章第一段列举了广告进入人们生活的各种途径， 如电视、 收音机、 报纸、 电梯等， 所有这些都是人们在路途中或休闲时听到或看到的， 而不是在上班时间。 因为， 以上广告效果最不理想的时间段应当是B选项中所指的工作时间。
单选题 According to the passage, a designer of products is preoccupied with the following problems EXCEPT _____.
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】根据文中第三段中部， “The designer is busy enough without adding customer appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine tolerances and stress factors”， 可知如何吸引顾客这一任务不包含在产品设计者考虑的范围之内。
单选题 Advertisers are appreciated by manufacturers because they _____.
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】根据文章第三段， 厂家可以不必去考虑如何吸引顾客， 而把这一任务交给广告商。 因此选B， 即广告商要承担使产品更具吸引力的任务。
单选题 According to the last paragraph, if changes are called for, some manufactures are more willing to change _____.
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】定位至文章最后一段可知， 与其大费周章地对产品本身进行改造， 制造商更愿意就产品的外观进行改造， 因此答案为A选项。