体验英语阅读理复习材料.docVIP

体验英语阅读理解复习材料 1. Bathtub Battleships from Ivorydale American mothers have long believed that when it comes to washing out the mouths of naughty children, nothing beats Ivory Soap (a registered trademark of the Proctor Gamble Company). This is because its reputation for being safe, mild, and pure is as solid and spotless as the marble of the Lincoln Memorial. It doesnt even taste all that bad. And should you drop it into a tubful of cloudy, child-colored water, not to worry — it floats. Ivory Soap is an American institution, about as widely recognized as the Washington Monument and far more well respected than Congress. It had already attained this noble status when Theodore Roosevelt was still a rough-riding cowboy in North Dakota. Introduced in 1879 as an inexpensive white soap intended to rival the quality of imported soaps, it was mass marketed by means of one of the first nationwide advertising campaigns. People were told that Ivory was so pure that it floats, and the notion took hold. As a result, at least half a dozen generations of Americans have gotten themselves clean with Ivory. So many hands, faces, and baby bottoms have been washed with Ivory that their numbers beat the imagination. Not even Proctor Gamble knows how many billions of bars of Ivory have been sold. The company keeps a precise count, however, of the billions of dollars it earns. Annual sales of Ivory Soap, Ivory Snow, Crest toothpaste, Folgers coffee, and the hundreds of other products now marketed under the Proctor Gamble umbrella exceed thirty billion dollars.　 The company has grown a bit since it was founded in 1837 in Cincinnati, Ohio, by a pair of immigrants named William Proctor and James Gamble, each of whom pledged $3,596.47 to the enterprise. For decades Proctor Gamble manufactured candles and soap in relatively modest quantities. It took more than twenty years for sales to top one million dollars, which they did shortly before the Civil War. The companys big break came with