Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Soccer might be the most popular sport in the world, but for decades, Americans have managed to resist its charm. Their attention has been focused, of course, on the big three American sports: baseball, football and basketball. And while soccer is rapidly gaining popularity among younger Americans, the older generation remains detached from the game, even when the rest of the world is glued to TV screens watching the 2006 World Cup matches.
     It’s not as though soccer is a stranger to American shores. The U.S. national soccer team played in the first World Cup in 1930. But from the start, the game had an image for many Americans as an immigrant sport. Still soccer began to attract more attention in the United States after the 1974 World Cup.
     The following year, the country got its first professional soccer teams, with the launch of the North American Soccer League. The New York Cosmos became the league’s flagship franchise when it acquired a stellar roster of players from 16 different countries, including the Brazilian soccer legend Pele, the high-scoring Italian great Georgio Chinagalia, and German superstar Franz Beckenbauer. By 1977, attendance at American soccer games had grown to a record 62,000.
     Peppe Pinton, a veteran soccer player and the executive director of the Cosmos soccer camps, likes to recall those golden days when American fans packed the stadiums to watch some of the world’s best soccer players — most of them playing on the same team. “Americans are used to watch winners,” Pinton says. “Americans are used to watch superstars, great players in all sports, and they are not settling for inferiority. The Cosmos team was not successful in the early years, but it was successful when those players came here.”
     People lined up to get into the stadium like they would line up to get into a popular restaurant, Pinton says. “People attracted people. And the Cosmos made this happen all over the U.S.,” he says. “It drew record crowds in Seattle, in Miami, in Tampa, Boston, in Chicago and then they went all over the world. They went even into China when nobody was reaching China those years.”
     But for 40 years, the U.S. was unable to qualify for World Cup games because most of the players on its soccer teams were not American citizens. Finally, in 1990, with enough home-grown or naturalized players on its rosters, the U.S. was able to field a World Cup team.