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  3. The idea of a vacuum cleaner originates from the 19th century. The first vacuum cleaners had to be operated manually. Two person

The idea of a vacuum cleaner originates from the 19th century. The first vacuum cleaners had to be operated manually. Two person

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问题     The idea of a vacuum cleaner originates from the 19th century. The first vacuum cleaners had to be operated manually. Two persons were needed for this: one to operate the bellows and the other to move the mouthpiece over the floor. The dust was blown into the air.
    On August 30th 1901 Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer, received a British patent for a vacuum cleaner. It took the form of a large, horse-drawn, petrol-driven unit which was parked outside the building to be cleaned with long hoses being fed through the windows.
    Until then vacuum cleaners blew the dust away, but Booth came up with the idea of sucking away dust, instead of blowing. Furthermore Booth equipped his cleaner with a filter, which kept the dust in the machine. All modern vacuum cleaners are based on Booth’s principle.
    As Hubert Booth, demonstrated his vacuuming device in a restaurant in 1901, two Americans introduced variations on the same theme. Corinne Dufour invented a device that sucked dust into a wet sponge. David E. Kenney’s huge machine was installed in the cellar and connected to a network of pipes leading to each room in the house. A corps of cleaners moved the machine from house to house.
    In 1903 wealthy society ladies threw "vacuum cleaner parties". Guests sipped their tea and lifted their feet for Booth’s uniformed attendants to vacuum the carpet. After giving a vacuum demonstration at the Royal Mint, Booth, on leaving, was promptly stopped by the police. He had forgotten to empty the dust bag, which contained a large quantity of gold dust from the Mint.
    In 1910 Professor Stanley Kent of University College, Bristol found 355,500,000 living organisms in just one gramme of dust extracted from Marlborough House, the home of HRH The Princess of Wales.
    In 1907, James Murray Spangler, a janitor in a Canton, Ohio department store, deduced that the carpet sweeper he used was the source of his cough. He tinkered with an old fan motor and attached it to a soap box stapled to a broom handle. Using a pillow case as a dust collector on the contraption, Spangler invented a portable electric vacuum cleaner. He then improved his basic model the first to use both a cloth filter bag and cleaning attachments, and received a patent in 1908, and formed the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. One of the first buyers was a cousin, whose husband, William H. Hoover, later became the president of the Hoover Company, with Spangler as superintendent. Hoover’s improvements resembled a bagpipe attached to a cake box, but they worked. Sluggish sales were given a kick by Hoover’s 10 day, free home trial, and eventually there was a Hoover® vacuum cleaner in nearly every home.
    John Thurman started a horse drawn (door to door service) vacuum system in St. Louis, similar to Booth’s. His vacuuming services were priced at $4 per visit in 1903. He invented his gasoline powered vacuum cleaner, in 1899 and some historians consider it the first motorized vacuum cleaner. Thurman’s machine was patented on October 3, 1899 (patent #634,042).
The author mentions the demonstration at the Royal Mint in order to illustrate that Booth’s vacuum cleaner_______.
选项 A、amazed the upper class
B、could work efficiently
C、was once very popular
D、needed improvement
答案B
解析 第5段提到了“吸尘器派对”和在皇家造币厂的展示，前者是为了说明Booth的吸尘器很受欢迎，第2句末尾的a large quantity of gold表明提及在皇家造币厂的展示是为了说明Booth的吸尘器工作效率很高。由此可见，本题应选B。
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