High-Q | English פסיכומטרי

Reading Comprehension

TEXT 7

Before jeans were blue, even before they were pants, “jeans” was a twilled cotton cloth, similar to denim, used for making sturdy work clothes. The textile was milled in the Italian town of Genoa, which French weavers called Genes, the origin of the English word “jeans”. 5 tailor named Levi Strauss. When Strauss arrived in San Francisco during the gold rush of the 1850s, he sold much-needed canvas for tents and covered wagons. An astute observer, he realized that miners went through trousers, literally and quickly, so Strauss stitched some of his heavy-duty canvas into coveralls. Though coarse and stiff, the pants held up so well that Strauss was in demand as a tailor. 10 In the early 1860s, he replaced canvas with denim, a softer fabric milled in Nimes, France. Known in Europe as ‘serge de Nimes’, in America the textile’s name was pronounced “denim”. And Strauss discovered that dying neutral-colored denim pants indigo blue to minimize soil stains greatly increased their popularity. Cowboys, to achieve a snug fit, put on a pair of Strauss’s pants, soaked in a stream, then lay in the sun 15 to shrink-dry the material. While denim pants resisted tearing, miners complained that the weight of tools often caused pockets to split at the seams. Strauss solved that problem by borrowing an idea from a Russian tailor named Jacob Davis. In 1873, copper rivets appeared at each pocket seam, as well as one rivet at the base of the fly to prevent the crotch seam from opening 20 when a miner squatted panning for gold. The origin of blue jeans, though, is the biography of a seventeen-year-old immigrant

31. According to the first paragraph, Strauss’s denim trousers are nowadays called “jeans” because - (1) of the name of the particular kind of cloth from which they were made (2) the person who invented them was named "Jean" (3) of the name of the town where a cloth similar to the one they were made of was produced (4) the cowboys and miners who first wore them called them “jeans”

32. According to the text, Levi Strauss –

(1) did not originally intend to sell trousers (2) was a miner in San Francisco (3) was not the actual inventor of blue jeans (4) was an immigrant to the US from Genoa

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