大学英语精读文本第4册Unit 1

Unit 1

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Two college-age boys, unaware that making money usually involves hard work, are tempted by an advertisement that promises them an easy way to earn a lot of money. The boys soon learn that if something seems to good to be true, it probably is.

BIG BUCKS THE EASY WAY

John G. Hubbell

"You ought to look into this," I suggested to our two college-age sons. "It might be a way to avoid the indignity of having to ask for money all the time." I handed them some magazines in a plastic bag someone bad hung on our doorknob. A message printed on the bag offered leisurely, lucrative work ("Big Bucks the Easy Way!") of delivering more such bags.

"I don't mind the indignity," the older one answered.

"I can live with it," his brother agreed.

"But it pains me," I said，"to find that you both have been panhandling so long that it no longer embarrasses you."

The boys said they would look into the magazine-delivery thing. Pleased, I left town on a business trip. By midnight I was comfortably settled in a hotel room far from home. The phone rang. It was my wife. She wanted to know how my day had gone.

"Great!" I enthused. "How was your day?" I inquired.

"Super!" She snapped. "Just super! And it's only getting started. Another truck just pulled up out front."

"Another truck?"

"The third one this evening. The first delivered four thousand Montgomery Wards. The second brought four thousand Sears, Roebucks. I don't know what this one has, but I'm sure it will be four thousand of something. Since you are responsible, I thought you might like to know what's happening.

What I was being blamed for, it turned out, was a newspaper strike which made it necessary to hand-deliver the advertising inserts that normally are included with the Sunday paper. The company had promised our boys $600 for delivering these inserts to 4,000 houses by Sunday morning.

"Piece of cake!" our older college son had shouted.

" Six hundred bucks!" His brother had echoed, "And we can do the job in two hours!"

"Both the Sears and Ward ads are four newspaper-size pages," my wife informed me. "There are thirty-two thousand pages of advertising on our porch. Even as we speak, two big guys are carrying armloads of paper up the walk. What do we do about all this?"

"Just tell the boys to get busy," I instructed. "They're college men. They'll do what they have to do."

At noon the following day I returned to the hotel and found an urgent message to telephone my wife. Her voice was unnaturally high and quavering. There had been several more truckloads of ad inserts. "They're for department stores, dime stores, drugstores, grocery stores, auto stores and so on. Some are whole magazine sections. We have hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of