News
Q1-5
Female: Now let’s turn to eating habits. France is traditionally known as home of the two-hour, sit-down, mid-day meal, but nowadays it’s witnessing a boom in take-out sandwiches. At noon, customers line up outside Paris bakeries, waiting to buy long fan versions of a shrimp salad and fruit sandwich or other delicacies. The variation in eating habits is reflecting a deeper change in French society.
Male: Right! It starts with the change in the workforce, so it’s a feminization, white-collarization, if I can say so.
Female: The result has been a revolution in one of France’s core industries, the bakery. Formerly, bakeries here offered a limited range of albeit excellent products about four kinds of bread, breakfast, and dessert pastries. Now that’s just the start.
Male: Au Pair Gourmet , a bakery on the corner of a market street, is in the ordinary working class area of Paris. It is eight in the morning, and the owner already has the slicer going, cutting bread for lunch sandwiches.
Female: Every morning Au Pair Gourmet, with its glass cases stacked full, does so much sandwich business. The owner says she is just responding to the demands. She even tried making a four-course sandwich meal. It was a bit much for people to swallow.
Male: Nowadays, people want to eat faster at noon, and leave earlier at the end of the day. Life is changing. We have to keep up. The changes include women making up almost half the labor force now, and men more likely to be working behind a jack hammer, not needing to eat so much.
Female: They also have to pick up the children as early as possible from the day care center.
Male: So basically, they look for something that’s very close to what is called fast food, and the interesting point is that the supply that has developed goes well beyond your basic MacDonald’s hamburgers.
Female: For example. Au Pair Gourmet’s multi-shaped, multi-content sanwiches. They are obviously a hit with the lunch time customers who line up all the way onto the sidewalk. They agree this recent phenomenon is growing. It’s exploding, this kind of eating. Every baker offers sandwiches.
Male: Because before it was only with ham and butter, and now we have salad and tomatoes. Because we eat sandwich, but it’s French products in it.
Female: French products in it. That may be the key. Instead of being overrun by MacDonald at some field, the French have adapted the idea of fast food and made it their own.
Q1: What is the main topic of the conversation?
Q2: What is the reason behind the revolution in the bakery industry?
Q3: Which of the following statements best describes the fast food supplying in France now?
Q4: Which of the following statements is true according to the conversation?
Q5: Why are the hamburgers offered by bakery such as “Au Pair Gourmet” so popular now?
翻译资格课程试听
