1．Pawn shops are businesses where people bring their possessions to sell or to get a short-term loan. Pawn shops may be large or small, clean or dirty, but they are all full of stories. The United States has about ten thousand of them.
2．In the past few years, pawn shops have been doing business with more people than ever before. That is because many lenders(贷方) now do business only with individuals having good credit records or a high-paying job. Often, the individuals most in need of a loan have poor credit records. But they do not need a good job or credit record to get a loan from a pawnbroker(典当商). They only need to have something of value.
3．When a traditional lender agrees to provide a loan, it may take days or weeks before an individual receives the money. But pawnbrokers will give a loan in just a few minutes based on the resale value of an object and without asking about the person's job or credit history.
4．Many pawn shops specialize in jewelry. But most shops accept almost anything of value, including computers, musical instruments, guns, old coins and so on. The item itself acts as the security, or collateral(抵押物), for the loan. If the loan is not repaid, the object can be sold. Customers can get the object back at any time by repaying the loan plus the interest and fees they agreed to pay. Or they can pay the interest and leave the item at the pawn shop for a while longer.
5．The National Pawnbrokers Association is a national trade group representing pawnbrokers. The association calls pawn-brokering "one of humankind's oldest financial institutions." It says pawnbrokers operated three thousand years ago in ancient China and in early Greek and Roman times.
Paragraph 2 _____.
A、Quick loan from a pawnbroker
B、Properties of a pawnbroker
C、How does a pawn shop run?
D、What is a pawn shop?
E、Pawn-brokering: a trade with a long history
F、Recent development of pawn shops
【正确答案】：F
【题目解析】：本段主要讲述了在过去的几年里当铺和更多的人在做生意，那是因为现在许多贷方只和有良好信用记录或者有高收入工作的人做生意，而那些最需要贷款的个人的信用记录经常很差；但是那些最需要贷款的个人不需要有一份好工作或者有良好信用记录就可以从典当商那里贷款，他们只需要有值钱的东西就可以了。故本段讲述的是当铺最近的发展。
