单项选择题

Passage Two

To be fair, this observation is also frequently made of Canada and Canadians, and should best be considered North American. There are, of course, exceptions. Small-minded officials, rude waiters, and ill-mannered taxi drivers are hardly unknown in the US. Yet it is an observation made so frequently that it deserves comment. For a long period of time and in many parts of the country, a traveler was a welcome break in an otherwise dull existence. Dullness and loneliness were common problems of the families who generally lived distant from one another. Strangers and travelers were welcome sources of diversion, and brought news of the outside worl. The harsh realities of the frontier also shaped this tradition of hospitality. Someone traveling alone, if hungry, injured, or ill, often had nowhere to turn except to the nearest cabin or settlement. It was not a matter of choice for the traveler or merely a charitable impulse on the part of the settlers. It reflected the harshness of daily life: if you didn’t take in the stranger and take care of him, there was no one else who would. And someday, remember, you might be in the same situation. Today there are many charitable organizations which specialize in helping the weary traveler. Yet, the old tradition of hospitality to strangers is still very strong in the US, especially in the smaller cities and towns away from the busy tourist trails. "I was just traveling through, got talking with this American, and pretty soon he invited me home for dinner-amazing. " Such observations reported by visitors to the US are not uncommon, but are not always understood properly. The casual friendliness of many Americans should be interpreted neither as superficial nor as artificial, but as the result of a historically developed cultural tradition. As is true of any developed society, in America a complex set of cultural signals, assumptions, and conventions underlies all social interrelationships. And, of course, speaking a language does not necessarily mean that someone understands, social and cultural patterns.
Visitors who fail to "translate" cultural meanings properly often draw wrong conclusions. For example, when an American uses the word "friend", the cultural implications of the word may be quite different from those it has in the visitor’s language and culture. It takes more than a brief encounter on a bus to distinguish between courteous convention and individual interest. Yet, being friendly is a virtue that many Americans value highly and expect from both neighbors and strangers.
The tradition of hospitality to strangers （）.

A．tends to be superficial and artificial
B．is generally well kept up in the United States
C．is always understood properly
D．has something to do with the busy tourist trails

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The passage suggests that the author would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements about the requirement that Black writers employ Western European literary techniques ？（）

A．The requirement was imposed more for social than for aesthetic reasons.
B．The requirement was a relatively unimportant aspect of the African American tradition.
C．The requirement was the chief reason for Hughes’s success as a writer.
D．The requirement was appropriated for some forms of expression but not for others.

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How is petroleum formed

As automobiles, trucks, buses, and aircraft of all sorts came into use, each with internal combustion engines, the demand for petroleum zoomed upward. Houses began to be heated by burning fuel oil rather than coal. Ships began to use oil; electricity began to be formed from the energy of burning oil.
In 1900, the energy derived from burning petroleum was only 4 percent that of coal. After World War II , the energy derived from burning the various fractions of petroleum exceeded that of coal, and petroleum is not the chief fuel powering the world’s technology.
The greater convenience of petroleum as compared with coal is, however, balanced by the fact that petroleum exist on Earth in far smaller quantities than coal does. (This is not surprising, since the fatty substances from which petroleum was formed are far less common on Earth than the woody substances from which coal was formed.)
The total quantity of petroleum now thought to exist on Earth is about 14 trillion gallons. In weight that is only one-ninth as much as the total existing quantity of coal and, at the present moment, petroleum is being used up much more quickly. At the present rate of the use, the world’s supply of petroleum may last for only thirty years or so.
There is another complication in the fact that petroleum is not nearly so evenly distributed as coal is. The major consumers of energy have enough local coal to keep going but are, however, seriously short of petroleum. The United Stated has 10 percent of the total petroleum reserves of the world in its own territory, and has been a major producer for decades. It still is, but its enormous consumption of petroleum products is now making it an oil importer, so that it is increasingly dependent on foreign nations for this vital resource. The Soviet Union has about as much petroleum as the United States, but it uses less, so it can be an exporter.
Nearly three-fifths of all known petroleum reserves on Earth is to be found in the territory of the various Arabic-speaking countries. Kuwait, for instance, which is a small nation at the head of the Persian Gulf, with an area only three-fourths that of Massachusetts and a population of about half a million, possesses about one-fifth of all the known petroleum reserves in the world.
The political problems this creates are already becoming crucial.