way2go! 6, Schulbuch

47 Read the other extracts and discuss the questions below them. 3 […] Even better in terms of elevated pleasures was the Shops Building on Walnut Street. A lovely old office building some seven or eight stories high and built in a faintly Moorish style 9 , it housed a popular coffee shop in its lobby on the ground floor, above which rose, all the way to a distant ceiling, a central atrium, around which ran the building’s staircase and galleried hallways. It was the dream of every young boy to get up that staircase to the top floor. Attaining 10 the staircase required cunning and a timely dash because you had to get past the coffee shop manageress, a vicious, eagle-eyed stick of a woman named Mrs. Musgrove who hated little boys (and for good reason, as we shall see). But if you selected the right moment when her attention was diverted, you could sprint to the stairs and on up to the dark eerie heights of the top floor, where you had a kind of gun-barrel view of the diners far below. If, further, you had some kind of hard candy with you – peanut M&Ms were especially favored because of their smooth aerodynamic shape – you had a clear drop of seven or eight stories. A peanut M&M that falls seventy feet into a bowl of tomato soup makes one heck of a splash, I can tell you.  4  mundane: gewöhnlich, normal  5  conveyor belt: Fließband  6  bowels of the earth: Erdinnere ( wörtlich : Eingeweide der Erde)  7  to have sth. to commend it: etw. haben, das es auszeichnet/das es einzigartig macht  8  pneumatic tubes: Rohrpost  9  built in a faintly Moorish style: an die islamische Architektur Südspaniens erinnernd 10  to attain sth.: etw. erreichen Dahl’s had one other feature that was much admired. When your groceries were bagged (or ‘sacked’ in Iowa) and paid for, you didn’t take them to your car with you, as in more mundane 4 supermarkets, but rather you turned them over to a friendly man in a white apron who gave you a plastic card with a number on it and placed the groceries on a special sloping conveyor belt 5 that carried them into the bowels 6 of the earth and through a flap into a mysterious dark tunnel. You then collected your car and drove to a small brick building at the edge of the parking lot, a hundred or so feet away, where your groceries, nicely shaken and looking positively refreshed from their subterranean adventure, reappeared a minute or two later and were placed in your car by another helpful man in a white apron who took back the plastic card and wished you a happy day. It wasn’t a particularly efficient system – there was a line of cars at the little brick building if truth be told, and the juddering tunnel ride didn’t really do anything except dangerously overexcite all carbonated beverages for at least two hours afterwards – but everyone loved and admired it anyway. It was like that wherever you went in Des Moines in those days. Every commercial enterprise had something distinctive to commend it 7 . The New Utica department store downtown had pneumatic tubes 8   rising from each cash register. The cash from your purchase was placed in a cylinder, then inserted in the tubes and fired – like a torpedo – to a central collection point, such was the urgency to get the money counted and back into the economy. A visit to the New Utica was like a trip to a future century. From the point of view of an eight-year-old, this system was “loved and admired”. What do you think the grown-up customers thought about it? What kinds of goods deliveries are customer- friendly today? Why was this kind of payment considered futuristic at that time? What are popular methods of payment today? 2 3 4 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv