单选题
You may have wondered why the supermarkets are all the same. It is not because the companies that operate them lack imagination. It is because they all aim at persuading people to buy things. In the supermarket, it takes a while for the mind to get into a shopping mode. This is why the area immediately inside the entrance is known as the " decompression zone". People need to slow down and look around, even if they are regulars. In sales terms this area is bit of a loss, so it tends to be used more for promotion. Immediately inside the first thing shoppers may come to is the fresh fruit and vegetables section. For shoppers, this makes no sense. Fruit and vegetables can be easily damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But what is at work here? It turns out that selecting good fresh food is a way to start shopping, and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the unhealthy stuff later on. Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed towards the back of a store to provide more opportunities to tempt customers. But supermarkets know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is to boost "dwell time" : the length of time people spend in a store. Traditionally retailers measure "football" , as the number of people entering a store is known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend there. But nowadays, a piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path Intelligence, a British company tracked people's phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large retailer centre in Portsmouth — not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time rose 1 $ sales rose 1. 3% . Such techniques are increasingly popular because of a deepening understanding about how shoppers make choices. People tell market researchers that they make rational decisions about what to buy, considering things like price, selection or convenience. But subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work.
单选题
In Paragraph 2, "decompression zone" is the area meant to______.
【正确答案】
A
【答案解析】解析:细节题。文中第二段的前两句话提到:“In the supermarket,it takes a while for themind to get into a shopping mode.This is why the area immediately inside the entrance is known asthe‘decompression zone”可见“休闲地带”的作用是为人们尽快进入购物状态做好准备。故答案为A。
单选题
Putting fruit-and-vegetable section near the entrance takes advantage of shoppers' ______.
【正确答案】
C
【答案解析】解析:细节题。从第三段的最后一句:“It turns out that selecting good fresh food is a wayto start shopping,and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the unhealthy stuff lateron.”可以推断出,商家把果蔬放在商店门口,是为了让人们在先挑到了新鲜的果蔬后觉得很兴奋,即使后来买些不太健康的东西,负罪感也会少一点,利用了消费者的购物心理。故答案为C。
【答案解析】解析:推理题。从文中最后一段最后一句话:“But subconscious forces,involvingemotion and memories,are clearly also at work.”可以看出,虽然人们告诉市场研究员,他们会做出理性的决定,但是,包括情感和记忆的潜意识同样也会影响人们的选择。可见,作者认为人们在购物时比他们想象的感性得多。故答案为D。