Passage 1 ⇱
The first Starbucks coffee shop opened in 1971 in downtown Seattle, Washington, in the United States. It was a small coffee shop that roasted its own coffee beans. The coffee shop’s business did well, and by 1981 there were three more Starbucks stores in Seattle.
Things really began to change for the company in 1981. That year, Howard Schultz met the three men who ran Starbucks. Schultz worked in New York for a company that made kitchen equipment. He noticed that Starbucks ordered a large number of special coffee makers, and he was curious about the company. Schultz went to Seattle to see what Starbucks did, and he liked what he saw. He wanted to become part of the company. In 1982, the original Starbucks owners hired Schultz as the company’s head of marketing.
In 1983, Schultz traveled to Italy. The unique atmosphere of the espresso bars there caught his eye. To Schultz it seemed that Italians spent their daily lives in three places: home, work, and coffee bars. His experience in Italy gave Schultz a new idea for Starbucks back in Seattle.
Schultz created an atmosphere for Starbucks coffee shops that was comfortable and casual, and customers everywhere seemed to like it. Between 1987 and 1992, Starbucks opened 150 new stores – and that was only the beginning. As a matter of fact, by the year 2000, three new Starbucks stores became increasingly ubiquitous.
Today, Starbucks has thousands of stores, including stores in twenty-six countries. One thing that helps make Starbucks succeed in cities outside the United States is the way Starbucks works with local stores and restaurants. By working together with a store already in the city, Starbucks gains an understanding of customers in the city. This understanding helps Starbucks open stores in the right locations for their customers.
(adapted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Starbucks)
Passage 2 ⇱
The handling and delivery of mail has always been a serious business, underpinned by the trust of the public in requiring timeliness, safety, and confidentiality.
After early beginnings using horseback and stagecoach, and although cars and trucks later replaced stagecoaches and wagons, the Railway Mail Service still stands as one of America’s most resourceful and exciting postal innovations. This service began in 1832, but grew slowly until the Civil War. Then from 1862, by sorting the mail on board moving trains, the Post Office Department was able to decentralize its operations as railroads began to crisscross the nation on a regular basis, and speed up mail delivery. This service lasted until 1974. During peak decades of service, railway mail clerks handled 93% of all non-local mail and by 1905 the service had over 12,000 employees.
Railway Post Office trains used a system of mail cranes to exchange mail at stations without stopping. As a train approached the crane, a clerk prepared the catcher arm which would then snatch the incoming mailbag in the blink of an eye. The clerk then booted out the outgoing mailbag. Experienced clerks were considered the elite of the Postal Service’s employees, and spoke with pride of making the switch at night with nothing but the curves and feel of the track to warn them of an upcoming catch. They also worked under the greatest pressure and their jobs were considered to be exhausting and dangerous. In addition to regular demands of their jobs they could find themselves the victims of train wrecks and robberies.
As successful as it was, “mail-on-the-fly” still had its share of glitches. If they hoisted the train’s catcher arm too soon, they risked hitting switch targets, telegraph poles or semaphores, which would rip the catcher arm off the train. Too late, and they would miss an exchange.
(adapted from TOEFL reading)
Passage 3 ⇱
Today, text-messaging has probably become young people’s most common form of communication. Some teachers think that because of this, young people are not writing correctly at school. They fear that once students get used to it, they will find it hard to switch back to using correct grammar and spelling. How did things begin this way?
It all began with e-mail, online chat rooms, and games. Then step by step young people made sentences, phrases and words shorter. As text-messaging continued to become popular, people invented more and more words. Today, it is like a real language with its own grammar and vocabulary. The growth of text-messaging has raised an important question: As students become fluent in text¬messaging, do their writing skills suffer?
People have different ideas about the effects of text-messaging on students’ writing skills. Some say that students are losing the ability to write long, correct sentences because of text-messaging. Others say that text-messaging is having a good effect on the language students use in then schoolwork. It shows that they are creative and good at expressing themselves. And if students can keep the two systems separate - one for text¬-messaging and one for school - this will help students appreciate reading and writing more.
Some people suggest that one way to reduce the bad effects of text-messaging is to find ways to use technology as a positive learning tool. For example, students can be allowed to type their assignments in a cell phone message and send them to their teachers, but they must type correctly. In this way, students are using the technology that they are familiar with to communicate in a form of language suitable for schoolwork. It shows students that text-messaging is fine for social communication, but correct grammar and spelling are necessary for communication in school.
(Adapted from Strategic Reading by Richards and Eckstut-Didier)