With Chinese consumers hit by quarantine （隔离期）and travel restrictions as well as just cautious about going out to the shops due to the coronavirus epidemic（流行病），companies in China are experimenting with new tricks to make sales.
Oil giant Sinopec — keen to get customers back in their cars and help farmers due to roadblocks — launched a new project last month called "zerotouch" vegetable sales at its 6,000 gas stations in 147 Chinese cities. Consumers place and pay for orders on the app and when they drive up, gas station employees put the vegetables into their car trunk, eliminating any need for human-to-human contact.
"The coronavirus outbreak has made it difficult for people to shop as before," said Li Hong， vice president of Sinopec's convenience store sales division. "Travel demand has been falling, but demand for food is pretty rigid."
Mengniu Dairy, China's dairy producer, is racing to add more vending machines to the 10,000 it currently has, saying the epidemic has driven unexpectedly strong demand for the sales channel. Its system allows customers to order products like milk and yoghurt online which can then be picked up from their local vending machine. "The virus outbreak has decreased consumption for dairy products as people are unwilling to go to the supermarket," said Meng Fanjie, head of the company's Communist Party committee. Luckin Coflfee, a competitive rival to Starbucks, now also offers the sanitizer (消毒） products （e.g. hand soap） besides coffee. Liu Xingliaging, an independent retait analyst, said, however, that Luckin's strategy would have only a modest impact. “At best some users will place an order when they buy coffee, but nobody is deliberately choosing the Luckin app just to buy sanitizer.”
【小题1】According to the passage, why did some companies adopt new selling methods?| A．Citizens were not allowed to go out. |
| B．The demand for travel and food declined sharply. |
| C．The coronavirus epidemic changed people's way of life. |
| D．Companies desired to grasp the chance to defeat their competitors. |
| A．meeting | B．removing |
| C．decreasing | D．limiting |
| A．illustrate the difficulty caused by the coronavirus epidemic |
| B．explain the changes made by some companies in the epidemic |
| C．describe the challenges some companies met during the epidemic |
| D．reveal the intelligence people showed in the coronavirus epidemic |
