Levi Strauss was born in Bavaria (巴伐利亚) in Europe in 1829. He emigrated（移居）to the United States of America when he was seventeen years old. His brothers sold cloth, and he worked for them even though he could not speak English very well. At this time many people were moving to California because gold was discovered there. Strauss went to look for gold, too.
Strauss took a lot of cloth with him to San Francisco. He thought that he could make tents out of the cloth and sell them to people working in the gold fields. But when he got there, he saw that people had a greater need for clothes than tents. Clothes did not last very long in the gold fields. At first Strauss made pants out of canvas（帆布）. They were very strong ---- much stronger than other pants. Soon everyone was wearing them , so he decided only to make pants. He opened a small store and made a lot of money from selling pants.
After a while, Strauss found a material even stronger than canvas. It came from a town in France called Nimes. The French called the material serge de Nimes, which means “cloth from Nimes”. The Americans called it denim. Strauss also bought some cloth from Genoa, a town in Italy. To Americans this name sounds like “jeans”, so they called his pants jeans. The cloth that Strauss used was always blue, so people also called his pants blue jeans and blue denims. Other people called them Levi’s. Levi Strauss jeans are some of the best-selling jeans in the world today. They last a long time and are very comfortable.
56. 小题1:When Levi Strauss went to San Francisco for the first time, he wanted to ______.
A．find a strong material to make pants
B．work for his brothers
C．make money by selling tents
D．open a store to make pants57. 小题2:In the beginning Strauss made pants from ______.
A．serge de Nimes
B．silk
C．denim
D．canvas58. 小题3:The name “jeans” was first used by ______.
A．Bavarians
B．Americans
C．Italians
D．Frenchmen59. 小题4:The story is about ______.
A．where cloth came from
B．the man who first made jeans
C．how to make lots of money
D．life on the gold fields
