《1997年10月托福考試閱讀理解全真試題》

Question 1-7

Hotels were among the earliest facilities that bound the

United States together. They were both creatures and creators

of communities, as well as symptoms of the frenetic quest for

community. Even in the first part of the nineteenth century,

Americans were already forming the habit of gathering from all

corners of the nation for both public and private, business and

pleasure purposes. Conventions were the new occasions, and

hotels were distinctively American facilities making conven-

tions possible. The first national convention of a major party to

choose a candidate for President (that of the National Republican

party, which met on December 12, 1831, and nominated

Henry Clay for President) was held in Baltimore, at a hotel

that was then reputed to be the best in the country. The

presence in Baltimore of Barnum s City Hotel, a six-story building

with two hundred apartments helps explain why many other

early national political conventions were held there.

In the longer run, too. American hotels made other national

conventions not only possible but pleasant and convivial.

The growing custom of regularly assembling from afar the

representatives of all kinds of groups - not only for political conventions,

but also for commercial, professional, learned, and

avocational ones - in turn supported the multiplying hotels. By

mid-twentieth century, conventions accounted for over a third

of the yearly room occupancy of all hotels in the nation, about

eighteen thousand different conventions were held annually

with a total attendance of about ten million persons.

Nineteenth-century American hotelkeepers, who were no

longer the genial, deferential "hosts" of the eighteenth-century

European inn, became leading citizens. Holding a large

stake in the community, they exercised power to make it

prosper. As owners or