考研英语阅读理解命题思路透析和真题揭秘(17)

1995年Passage l

Money spent on advertising is money spent as well as any I know of. It serves directly to assist a rapid distribution of goods at reasonable price, thereby establishing a firm home market and so making it possible to provide for export at competitive prices. By drawing attention to new ideas it helps enormously to raise standards of living. By helping to increase demand it ensures an increased need for labour, and is therefore an effective way to fight unemployment. It lowers the costs of many services: without advertisements your daily newspaper would cost four times as much, the price of your television license would need to be doubled, and travel by bus or tube would cost 20 per cent more.

And perhaps most important of all, advertising provides a guarantee of reasonable value in the products and services you buy. Apart from the fact that twenty-seven acts of Parliament govern the terms of advertising, no regular advertiser dare promote a product that fails to live up to the promise of his advertisements. He might fool some people for a little while through misleading advertising. He will not do so for long, for mercifully the public has the good sense not to buy the inferior article more than once. If you see an article consistently advertised, it is the surest proof I know that the article does what is claimed for it , and that it represents good value.

Advertising does more for the material benefit of the community than any other force I can think of.

There is one more point I feel I ought to touch on. Recently I heard a well-known television personality declare that he was against advertising because it persuades rather than informs. He was drawing excessively fine distinctions. Of course advertising seeks to persuade.

If its message were confined merely to information-and that in itself would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtly persuasive----advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention. But perhaps that is what the well-known television personality wants.

54. In the author's opinion,__.
[A]advertising can seldom bring material benefit to man by providing information
[B]advertising informs people of new ideas rather than wins them over
[C]there is nothing wrong with advertising in persuading the buyer
[D]the buyer is not interested in getting information from an advertisement

[答案] C

[解题思路]

本题对应于文章最后一段，该段第一句话指出"If its message were confined merely to information-and that in itself would be difficult if not impossible to achieve, for even a detail such as the choice of the colour of a shirt is subtly persuasive----advertising would be so boring that no one would pay any attention"（如果广告内容仅限于提供信息--这件事如果不是不可能，也很难实现，因为即使是对于衬衫颜色的挑选也具有一些劝诱性--那么广告将会变得非常索然无味，甚至没有人会注意到它），这是对那位电视名人的反驳，因而说明作者认为广告试图说服人们购买产品并不是一个问题，因此正确答案为C选项。B选项与原文意思相反，而A和D选项的表述在原文中没有提及。

[题目译文]

在作者看来，           。
[A]广告几乎不能通过提供信息给人们带来物质上的好处
[B]广告诉人们的是新想法，而不是要赢得他们
[C]通过广告来说服人们购买产品并没有什么过错
[D]买东西的人对于从广告中得到信息并不感兴趣