Passage Two

In 2000, with little but a bar and a church left to make it a destination, tiny St. James, Nebraska, was taken off state highway maps. Then the church closed, and the small farm village in the state’s northeast corner looked set to just disappear. Thanks to five devoted women, it didn’t.

In May 2001, after meeting with staff from the Center for Rural Affairs, the friends—Louis Guy, Vicky Koch, Jeanette Pinkelman, Mary Rose Pinkelman and Violet Pinkelman—opened a weekend market for vendors(小商贩) to sell handcrafts and local food.

“We felt like, what can we do to bring the community together?” says Mary Rose Pinkelman, “We decided to make a place to sell local goods.” They set up shop in the church school, which, though closed for nearly 40 years, had been well maintained. The first weekend, 16 vendors look over an old classroom. The result was an instant hit. Today, the market draws up to 70 vendors----who sell such items as homemade jellies, baked goods, hand-woven rugs, and farm-grown produce----and what Pinkelman calls an unexpected number of visitors. In the process, the market has made St. James a destination again, putting it back on the state road map.

40. According to Para. 1, what fate was St. James Nebraska suffering?

A The replacement of the church school

B The disappearance from highway maps

C The closedown of the bar

D The set-up of a market