WHAT WAS THE AMERICAN SMALL TOWN LIKE?
I'm glad I was born soon enough to have seen the American small town, if not at its height, at least in the early days of decline into its present forlorn status as a conduit for cars and people, all headed for some Big City over the horizon. The small town was not always a stultifying trap for bright young people to escape from; in the years before wartime travel ("How’re you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm/After they've seen Paree?") and the scorn of the Menckens and Sinclair Lewises made the cities a magnet for farm boys and girls, the town of five to twenty thousand was a self-sufficient little city-state of its own.
The main street of those Midwestern towns I remember from the thirties varied little from one place to another: there were always a number of brick Victorian buildings, labeled "Richard's Block" or "Deman Block," which housed, downstairs, the chief emporia of the town-the stores which made it a shire town for the surrounding farmlands. Each of these stores was run according to a very exact idea of the rules of its particular game. A hardware store, for instance, had to be densely hung inside with edged tools-scythes, sickles, saws-of all descriptions. It had to smell of oil, like metal, and often like the sacks of fertilizer stacked in the back room. It had to have unstained wood floors, sometimes sprinkled with sawdust, and high cabinets of small drawers containing bolts, screws, nails, and small plumbing accessories. It had to be owned and run by a middle-aged man in a blue apron, assisted by one up-and-coming young man and one part-time boy in his middle teens. It had to sell for cash on the barrelhead, and it did.
The drugstore was a horse of a different color (and order), but it was circumscribed by equally strict rules. Here you would ask the white-coated and (often rimless-spectacled) druggist for aspirin or Four-Way Cold Tablets or Bromo-Seltzer, or perhaps for paramedical advice, which he was glad to give. . . .
These towns are by and large gone in 1974, their old stores shut up with dusty windows, or combined, two or three at a time, to make a superette, a W.T. Grant store, or a sub-and-pizza parlor. The business has moved to the big shopping center on the Interstate or on to the city over the horizon, and the depopulated old towns drift along toward oblivion, centers of nothing in the middle of nowhere.
1. The incident of the lady fainting in the street is effective because it
A. point out the lack of doctors in small towns
B. emphasizes the indifference of small town residents
C. provides a reason for the decline of small towns
D. emphasizes the lack of professionalism in small town life
E. illustrates the role of small town druggists
2. why is the author's final phrase a good way to end the excerpt?
A. it shows the small towns never really served a purpose.
B. it sums up the futility of small town life
C. it explains why businesses moved to the big city.
D. it provides a reason why people left the small towns.
E. it emphasizes the death of small towns.
3. the author repeats the phrase " it had to ..." several times in order to
A. emphasizes the similarity of small town stores
B. emphasize the monotony of the merchants stores
C. demonstrates the lack of good management in small town stores
D. point out that small town merchants had little freedom
E. show the inevitability of the small town stores's decline
1.D
2.B
3.C
is this correct
ok so i changed it?
1.E
2.E
3.C
1.E ?? I don't see any reference to this lady.
2.E - yes
3.C - no
sorry i totally missed this line its right after
which was glad to give. (when "a lady" fainted"right on the street" in those days, she was carried directly to the drugstore and ministered to by the druggist, who was often known as "Doc")
1. E - yes
can you help me with 3? please
3. You can certainly rule out c. Bad management has nothing to do with that phraseology.
Let's look at your other choices.
a. are small town stores a lot alike?
b. are small town stores all boring?
d. were these similarities because someone made the store owners do certain things?
e. does that phraseology show how small towns are going down hill?