考研英语阅读理解命题思路透析和真题揭秘(11)

1999年Passage l

It's a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers' misfortunes.
 
Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might-surprise! --fall off. The label on a child's Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly."
 
While warnings are often appropriate and necessary--the dangers of drug interactions, for example--and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn't clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.
  
Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn't have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We're really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren't designed to prevent those kinds of injuries, "says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete's injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute--a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight-issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities," says a law professor at Cornell law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.

52. Manufacturers as mentioned in the passage tend to__
[A] satisfy customers by writing long warnings on products
[B] become honest in describing the inadequacies of their products
[C] make the best use of labels to avoid legal liability
[D] feel obliged to view customers' safety as their first concern

[答案] C

[解题思路] 本题对应于文章第二段的第一句话"Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident"（公司因此感到了威胁，便做出了反应，写出越来越长的警示标识语，力图预先标明种种可能发生的事故），可见商家极尽能事用商标来警告客户以免除自己的法律责任，因此C选项符合题意。A和B选项的satisfy customers和become honest都不是警告标签的主要原因，而D选项feel obliged to ...没有在原文中体现出来。

[题目译文]

文章中提到的生产者倾向于                        。
[A] 通过在产品上标上很长的警示语来满足顾客
[B] 在描述产品缺点时变得更加诚实
[C] 充分利用警示牌以避免负法律责任
[D] 认为自己有责任把顾客的安全放在第一位