Speed Reading

Skim or scan the following passages, and then decide on the best answer. 

     The human thumb made man. Its development was as important an event in man’s growth as his success in learning to walk upright. The thumb shaped the human hand. Without it, man might not have survived. Luckily, the hand developed only one thumb. Two thumbs on one hand would be like having two or more cooks in a small kitchen. They would get in each other’s way. As one English writer said almost 500 years ago, “Ah, each finger today is a thumb, I think.” 
     That is how we still describe a man who cannot get anything right. We say he is “all thumbs”. There are days when this happens to all of us, days when everything we do seems to go wrong. We cannot even get the right shoes on. The typist cannot hit the right key. The carpenter’s hammer misses the nail and hits his finger. Nothing can be done but throw up one’s hands and moan (悲叹), “God, I am all thumbs today!” 
     Clearly, the hand can have just one master—the thumb. It gives the hand a freedom and control of movement that are beautiful to see. This can be seen in old sculptures and stone carvings. We have a special phrase to express this mastery of the thumb. When one is ruled by another, completely controlled by him, we say the person is “under the other’s thumb”. A sick man, for example, often finds himself “under his doctor’s thumb”. Tenants have often complained about being “under the thumb of the landlord”. 
     There was a time, very long ago, when such tenants might in anger “bite their thumbs” at the landlord. Such a gesture was an insult that could not be accepted lightly. People no longer do this. But they do something as childish and as offensive and ugly. They “thumb their noses” at somebody they want to defy or insult.