Read the passage carefully. Choose an option (A, B, C, or D) that best answers each question:1. In an unremarkable
Read the passage carefully. Choose an option (A, B, C, or D) that best answers each question:
1. In an unremarkable business park outside the city of Ann Arbor in Michigan stands a poignant memorial to humanity’s shattered dreams. It doesn’t look like that from the outside, though. Even when you get inside, it takes a few moments for your eyes to get used to what you’re seeing. It appears to be a vast and haphazardly organized supermarket; along every aisle, grey metal shelves are crammed with thousands of packages of food and household products. There is something unusually cacophonous about the displays and soon enough you work out the reason: unlike in a real supermarket, there is only one of each item.
2. The storehouse, operated by a company called GfK Custom Research North America, has acquired a nickname: the Museum of Failed Products. This is consumer capitalism’s graveyard or, to put it less grandly, it’s almost certainly the only place on the planet where you’ll find A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside the equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only. The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer and self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers’ faces.
3. There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as “the pathos of things”. It captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life’s impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, for their fleeting nature. It’s only stretching the concept slightly to suggest that this is how the museum’s manager, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, feels about the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story on the part of designers, marketers, and salespeople. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments, and their family holidays riding on the success of products such as A Touch of Yogurt.
4. The Museum of Failed Products was itself a kind of accident, albeit a happier one. Its creator, a now retired marketing man named Robert McMath, merely intended to accumulate a “reference library” of consumer products, not failure per se. And so, starting in the 1960s, he began purchasing and preserving a sample of every new item he could find. Soon, the collection outgrew his office in upstate New York and he was forced to move into a converted granary to accommodate it. Later, GfK bought him out, moving the whole lot to Michigan. What McMath hadn’t taken into account was the three-word truth that was to prove the making of his career: most products fail. According to some estimates, the failure rate is as high as ninety percent. Simply by collecting new products indiscriminately, McMath had ensured that his hoard would come to consist overwhelmingly of unsuccessful ones.
5. By far the most striking thing about the museum, though, is that it should exist as a viable, profit-making business in the first place. You might have assumed that any consumer product manufacturer worthy of the name would have its own such collection – a carefully stewarded resource to help it avoid making errors its rivals had already made. Yet the executives who arrive every week at Sherry’s door are evidence of how rarely this happens. Product developers are so focused on their next hoped-for success, so unwilling to invest time or energy thinking about their industry’s past failures that they only belatedly realize how much they need to access GfK’s collection. Most surprising of all is that many of the designers who have found their way to the museum have come there to examine – or been surprised to discover – products that their own companies had created, then abandoned.
6. It isn’t hard to imagine how one downside of the positive thinking culture, an aversion to confronting failure, might have been responsible for the very existence of many of the products lining its shelves. Each one must have made it through a series of meetings at which nobody realized that the product was doomed. Perhaps nobody wanted to contemplate the prospect of failure; perhaps someone did but didn’t want to bring it up for discussion. By the time the truth became obvious, the original developers would have moved to other products or other firms. Little energy would have been invested in discovering what went wrong. Everyone involved would have conspired, perhaps without realizing what they’re doing, never to speak of it again. Failure is everywhere. It’s just that most of the time we’d rather avoid confronting that fact.
Trả lời cho các câu 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 dưới đây:
Which best serves as the title for the passage?
Đáp án đúng là: A
Đáp án cần chọn là: A
The word “haphazardly” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to _____________.
Đáp án đúng là: B
Đáp án cần chọn là: B
The word “indiscriminately” in paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to _____________.
Đáp án đúng là: D
Đáp án cần chọn là: D
According to the writer, what is remarkable about the product developers who visit GfK?
Đáp án đúng là: B
Đáp án cần chọn là: B
According to the writer, what is the reason why the storehouse does not resemble a supermarket?
Đáp án đúng là: D
Đáp án cần chọn là: D
What point is the writer making in the last paragraph?
Đáp án đúng là: C
Đáp án cần chọn là: C
The word “ones” in paragraph 4 refers to __________
Đáp án đúng là: C
Đáp án cần chọn là: C
What is Carol Sherry’s attitude to the failed products?
Đáp án đúng là: B
Đáp án cần chọn là: B
Quảng cáo
Group 2K8 ôn Thi ĐGNL & ĐGTD Miễn Phí
>> 2K8 Chú ý! Lộ Trình Sun 2026 - 3IN1 - 1 lộ trình ôn 3 kì thi (Luyện thi 26+ TN THPT, 90+ ĐGNL HN, 900+ ĐGNL HCM, 70+ ĐGTD - Click xem ngay) tại Tuyensinh247.com.Đầy đủ theo 3 đầu sách, Thầy Cô giáo giỏi, luyện thi theo 3 giai đoạn: Nền tảng lớp 12, Luyện thi chuyên sâu, Luyện đề đủ dạng đáp ứng mọi kì thi.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Hỗ trợ - Hướng dẫn
-
024.7300.7989
-
1800.6947
(Thời gian hỗ trợ từ 7h đến 22h)
Email: lienhe@tuyensinh247.com
