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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 Hoover Company began to prosper after _______.
选项 A、it used the free-home-trial strategy
B、it hired Spangler as superintendent
C、a vacuum cleaner suitable for every family was made
D、Hoover improved Spangler’s electric vacuum cleaner
答案A
解析 根据题干中的Hoover Company定位到第7段最后两句。第7段最后一句中的kick意为“刺激”，该句表明免费试用刺激了Hoover牌吸尘器的销量。从此以后，Hoover公司就进入千家万户，繁荣起来了，由此可见。本题应选A。
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