A. SKILL B. WORK C. MANAGEMENT D. BUSINESSREAD THE FOLLOWING PASSA...

60. A. skill

B. work

C. management

D. business

Read the following passage and choose A, B, c or D for each of the questions.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “icebox” had entered the American language,

but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States.

The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, taverns, and hospitals,

and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the

Civil War (1861 — 1865), as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, it also came into

household use. Even before 1880, half the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and

Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their

own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a

precursor of the modem refrigerator, had been invented.

Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early

nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science

of refrigeration, was undeveloped. The commonsense notion that the best icebox was one

that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the

ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included

wrapping the ice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end

of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation and

circulation needed for an efficient icebox.

But as early as 1803, an ingenious Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, had been on the

right track. He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington, for

which the village of Georgetown was the market center. When he

used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market, he found that

customers would pass up the rapidly melting stuff in the rubs of his competitors to pay a

premium price for his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, one-pound bricks. One

advantage of his icebox, Moore explained, was that farmers would no longer have to

travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool.