The tradition of giving gifts didn’t start with the modern holidays we celebrate. Many ancient cultures celebrated holidays with the exchange of gifts. People who love to give gifts often can’t wait until it’s time for the recipients to open their gifts. If you’ve ever been given a gift, you know that part of the fun is the curiosity that builds as you wonder what the gift is.

The wish to hide the identity of a gift until just the right moment led people to wrap gifts long, long ago. Historians believed wrapping gifts in paper probably started not long after paper was invented thousands of years ago.

Wrapping paper like what we use today, though, is a much more recent invention. More than 100 years ago, gifts were usually wrapped in heavy brown paper. Before that, cloth was often used. The technology to mass-produce wrapping paper didn’t come along until the early 1900s. The first American gift wrap company— Hy-Sill Manufacturing Inc. — was founded by Eli Hyman and Morris Silverman in 1903. It wasn’t as easy to wrap presents then as it is today, though, because adhesive tape (胶带) wasn’t invented until 1930.

Over the years, wrapping paper has developed into what we see in stores each holiday season. But scientists say that the United States alone produces an extra 5 million tons of waste over the holidays, most of which is from wrapping paper and shopping bags. To cut down on this waste, some people carefully unwrap presents, so that the wrapping paper can be reused. Others have started to use reusable gift bags instead of wrapping paper.

【小题1】What is the interesting part of people giving a gift?

A．Hiding their gifts and their feelings.

B．Giving the recipients a surprise.

C．Letting the recipients open gifts at once.

D．Following a century-old tradition.

【小题2】What can we learn from Paragraph 3?

A．People didn’t wrap gifts until 1903.

B．People only used heavy brown paper to wrap gifts.

C．Technology made wrapping paper widely available.

D．Adhesive tape was first created by gift wrap companies.

【小题3】What do scientists worry about?

A．The future of reusable gift bags.

B．The waste produced by Americans.

C．Wrapping paper’s influence on the environment.

D．People’s awareness of saving paper.

【小题4】What does the text mainly tell us?

A．The popularity of wrapping gifts.

B．The start of wrapping gifts in paper.

C．The problems caused by wrapping paper.

D．The story behind wrapping paper.