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
[解題思路] 本題對(duì)應(yīng)于文章第二段的第一句話"Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident"（公司因此感到了威脅，便做出了反應(yīng)，寫出越來(lái)越長(zhǎng)的警示標(biāo)識(shí)語(yǔ)，力圖預(yù)先標(biāo)明種種可能發(fā)生的事故），可見(jiàn)商家極盡能事用商標(biāo)來(lái)警告客戶以免除自己的法律責(zé)任，因此C選項(xiàng)符合題意。A和B選項(xiàng)的satisfy customers和become honest都不是警告標(biāo)簽的主要原因，而D選項(xiàng)feel obliged to ...沒(méi)有在原文中體現(xiàn)出來(lái)。
[題目譯文]
文章中提到的生產(chǎn)者傾向于 。
[A] 通過(guò)在產(chǎn)品上標(biāo)上很長(zhǎng)的警示語(yǔ)來(lái)滿足顧客
[B] 在描述產(chǎn)品缺點(diǎn)時(shí)變得更加誠(chéng)實(shí)
[C] 充分利用警示牌以避免負(fù)法律責(zé)任
[D] 認(rèn)為自己有責(zé)任把顧客的安全放在第一位
