阅读理解。
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you pick up in that kind of collection: little-known eighteenth-century poets, or out-of-date geography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
