Passage Three
You may have wondered why the supermarkets are all the same. It is not because the companies that them lack imagination. It is because they all aim at persuading people to buy things.
In the supermarket, it takes a while for the mind to get into a shopping mode. This is why the area immediately inside the entrance is known as the “decompression zone”. People need to slow down and look around, even if they are regulars. In sales terms this area is a bit of a loss, so it tends to be used more for promotion.
Immediately inside the first thing shoppers may come to is the fresh fruit and vegetables section. For shoppers, this makes no sense. Fruit and Vegetables can be easily damaged, so they should be bought at the end, not the beginning, of a shopping trip. But what is at work here? It turns out that selecting good fresh food is a way to start shopping, and it makes people feel less guilty about reaching for the unhealthy stuff later on.
Shoppers already know that everyday items, like milk, are invariably placed toward the back of a store to provide more opportunities to tempt customers. But supermarkets know shoppers know this, so they use other tricks, like placing popular items halfway along a section so that people have to walk all along the aisle looking for them. The idea is to boost “dwell time”: the length of time people spend in a store.
Traditionally retailers measure “footfall”, as the number of people entering a store is known, but those numbers say nothing about where people go and how long they spend there. But nowadays, a piece of technology can fill the gap: the mobile phone. Path Intelligence, a British company tracked people’s phones at Gunwharf Quays, a large retail centre in Portsmouth- not by monitoring calls, but by plotting the positions of handsets as they transmit automatically to cellular networks. It found that when dwell time rose 1% sales rose 1.3%.
Such techniques are increasingly popular because of a deepening understanding about how shoppers make choices. People tell market researchers that they make rational decisions about what to buy, considering things like price, selection or convenience. But subconscious forces, involving emotion and memories, are clearly also at work.

13. In Paragraph 2, “decompression zone” is the area meant to _____.
A. offer shoppers a place to have a rest
B. prepare shoppers for the mood of buying
C. encourage shoppers to try new products
D. provide shoppers with discount information
14. Putting fruit-and-vegetable section near the entrance takes advantage of shoppers’_____
A. common sense B. shopping habits
C. concerns with time D. shopping psychology
15. Path Intelligence uses a technology to _____.
A. count how many people enter a store
B. measure how long people stay at a store
C. find out what people buy in a store
D. monitor what people say and do in a store
16. What happened at Gunwharf Quays showed that sales_____.
A. was in direct proportion to dwell time
B. was reversely linked to dwell time
C. was affected more by footfall than by dwell time
D. was affected more by dwell time than by football
17. The author argues that shoppers_____.
A. exert more influence on stores than they imagine
B. are more likely to make rational choices than they know
C. tend to make more emotional decisions than they think
D. have more control over what they buy than they assume
18. The best title for the passage is _____.
A. New Technology Boosts Stores’ Sales
B. How Shoppers Make Choices in Stores
C. Rational and Irrational Ways of Shopping
D. The Science behind Stores’ Arrangements

参考答案：BDBACD