READING COMPREHENSION

HOW WERE JEANS INVENTED?

The story of jeans started at the time of the American Gold Rush.    In 1849 thousands of people went to California to dig for gold and hopefully make their fortune.    Among them was a young man called Levi Strauss who went to California from Germany at the age of 18.    He didn´t find any gold but he made a lot of money.    Levi Strauss realized that the gold miners needed very strong clothes which were easy to wash and which were comfortable to wear.    So in the early 1850´s he bought some thick cotton denim from a mill in New Hampshire, USA.    The name denim, used to describe the cotton, came from serge de Nimes, after the town of Nimes in the south of France.    Levi Strauss decided to make trousers from this strong material.    “If I make the trousers from denim,” he thought, “I´m sure people will buy them.    They´rather have trousers which will last a long time than the thin ones they´re wearing at present.”    And he was right.    Levi Strauss´s trousers were later called jeans, possibly because sailors from Genoa in Italy wore them.    The popularity of jeans increased and they were soon sold right across the USA.    In 1873, stitching, shaped like the wings of the Rocky Mountains Eagle, was added.    In the 1950´s, the fashion for jeans arrived in Europe.    A magazine advertisement showed that in the USA, jeans were worn every day and not just at work.    People in Europe began to wear jeans in their free time.    In the 1980 a jeans advertisement appeared on British TV.    In it, a young man walked into a launderette, took off his jeans and put them in a washing machine.    Everyone in the launderette was shocked.    As a result of the advertisement, the sales of that particular make of jeans increased by 800 per cent.

1. Where was the Gold Rush?

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2. What sort of trousers did the miners need?

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Where was the material for Levi Strauss´s trousers bought?

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Where does the word denim come from?

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Why did jeans become popular in Europe?

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Why were the people in the launderette in the jeans advertisement shocked?

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Explain with a sentencce what happened in 1849, 1850, 1870, 1950, and 1980

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