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The passage given below is followed by a set of questions. Choose the most appropriate answer to each question.

When i was little, children were bought two kinds of ice cream, sold from those white wagons with canopies made of silvery metal either the two-cent cone or the four-cent ice-cream pie. The two-cent cone was very small, in fact it could fit comfortable into a child’s hand, and it was made by taking the ice cream from its container with a special scoop and piling it on the cone. Granny always suggested I eat only a part of the cone, then throw away the pointed end, because it had been touched by the vendor’s hand ( though it was the best part, nice and crunchy, and it was regularly eaten in secret, after a pretence of discarding it).

The four-cent pie was made by a special little machine, also silvery, which pressed two disks of sweet biscuit against a cylindrical section of ice cream. First, you have to thrust your tongue into the gap between the biscuits until it couched the central nucleus of ice cream; then, gradually, you ate  the whole thing, the biscuit surfaces softening as they became soaked in creamy nectar. Granny had no advice to give here: in theory the pies had been touched only by the machine, in practice, the vendor had held them in his hand while giving them to us, but it was impossible to isolate the contaminated area.

I was fascinated, however, by some of my peers, whose parents bought them not a four-cent pie but two two-cent cones. These privileged children advanced proudly with one cone in their right hand and one in their left; and expertly moving their head from sie to side, they licked first one, then the other. This liturgy seemed to me so sumptuously enviable, that many time I asked to be allowed to celebrate it. In vain. My elders were inflexible: a four-cent ice, yes; but two two two-cent ones absolutely no.

As anyone can see, neither mathematics nor economy nor dietetics justified this refusal. Nor did hygene, assuming that in due course the tips of both cones were discarded. The pathetic and obviously mendacious, justification was that a boy concerned with turning his eyes from one cone to other was more inclined to stumble over stones, steps, or cracks in the pavement. I dimly sensed that there was another secret justification, cruelly pedagogical, but I was unable to grasp it.

Today, citizen and victim of a consumer society, a civilization of excess and waste (which the society of thirties was not), I realize that those dear and now departed elders were right. Two two-cent cones instead of one at four cents did not signify squandering, economically speaking, but symbolically they surely did. It was for this precise reason, that I yearned for them: because two ice creams suggested excess. And this way was precisely why they were denied to me: because they looked indecent, an insult to poverty, a display of fictitious privilege, a boast of wealth. Only spoiled children ate two cones at once, whose children who in fairy tales were rightly punished, as Pinocchio was when he rejected the skin and the stalk. And parents who encouraged this weakness, appropriate to little parvenus, were bringing up their children in the foolish theatre of “I would like to but I can’t”. They were preparing them to turn up at tourist-class-check-in with a fake Gucci bag bought from a street peddler on the beach at Rimini.

Nowadays, the moralists risks seeming at odds with morality, in a world where the consumer civilization now wants even adukts to be spoiled, and promises them always something more, from the wristwatch in the box of detergent to the bonus bangle sheathed, with the magazine it accompanies, in a plastic envelop. Like the parents of those ambidextrous gluttons I so envied, the consumer civilization pretends to give mere, but actually gives, for four cents, what is worth four cents. you will through away the old transistor radio to purchase the new one, the boasts an alarm clock as well, but some inexplicable defect in the mechanism will guarantee that the radio lasts only a year. The new cheap car will have leather seats, double side mirrors adjustable from inside,and a panelled dashboard, but it will not last nearly so long as the glorious old Fiat $500,$ which, even when it broke down, could be started again with a kick.

The morality of the old days made Spartans of us all, while today’s morality wants all of us to be Sybarites.

 

In the passage, the phrase “little parvenus” refers to

  1. naughty midgets
  2. old hags
  3. arrogant people
  4. young upstarts
  5. foolish kids
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